On Tue, 2007-05-08 at 15:19 +0100, Ben Smith wrote:
> On 07/05/07, Erick Tryzelaar <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> > 2. I'm not sure if this is LALR, but it'd be nice if we just had one
> > terminator for all of our "endcase", "endif", and "endmatch" constructs.
> > What if we just replaced them all with "end"? I do like "do"-"done", and
> > I'd like to raise that up to roughly equal "begin"-"end" from ocaml.
>
> I don't really agree with this one... As long as you're going to use
> words to bound your blocks, you might as well make them say clearly
> what you're doing. If it's a matter of saving keywords, you could
> simply use "end case", "end if" and "end match". That way you're
> saving keywords _and_ not losing any clarity for people reading code
> (or writing bad code...:)
I'm not interested in saving keywords as such.
The way I look at it, keywords are really set in a distinct
font. One language did this nicely:
if: x then: y else: z
Another way is
_goto fred
which C uses (_Complex is in C99). Two classes of English
words shouldn't cause problems: 'funny' words like
a the here there all each ..
which are neither nouns nor verbs, where the user has no
legitimate business using them for identifiers,
and special words which do invade the users namespace
but are fairly system specific, such as
gc_pointer
Anyhow I want to defer consideration of this, to see if
we can get dypgen working. If so, we have an extensible
GLR parser available, so that 'in principle' we only
need enough grammar to define a grammar and suitable
'user actions' denoting semantics, eg
statement:
| "call" expr expr { call($1,$2) }
| ....
where call denotes an Ocaml coded AST term.
I'm not sure how this will pan out, but it is appealing
then to minimise the syntax, with a good fraction being
for grammar specification, and the actual language
stuff in the library.
If we can 'open' syntax extensions along with data
and functions in modules, we have DSSLs .. and we
can move a lot of the sugar into the library,
so the keywords will only have an impact if
you use them.
--
John Skaller <skaller at users dot sf dot net>
Felix, successor to C++: http://felix.sf.net
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