---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: "Nicolas Pouillard" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
To: skaller <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Date: Wed, 9 May 2007 10:01:02 +0200
Subject: Re: [Felix-language] using #\printable-char as a character literal
On 5/9/07, skaller <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> On Wed, 2007-05-09 at 08:48 +0200, Nicolas Pouillard wrote:
>
> > I totally disagree, having a single "end" keyword is not ambiguous at
> > all since all construction are distinguished by the beginning and that
> > end markers are not optionals.
>
> I once read a good book on programming .. actually it was about
> how to be a good COBOL programmer .. but it introduced a fairly
> radical new idea to me. It's the analogue of what physicists
> call 'perturbation analysis', which is a study of satellite orbits.
>
[...]
>
> The point is the issue here isn't ambiguity of a correct
> program .. but ambiguity of an *incorrect* program.
Ok, that's a good point, XML guys say that too.
Having a program syntactically robust and stable is a good thing.
That's the same thing with XML, I don't care that XML data gets
generated, moved over the network and parsed at another point, but I
don't want write it by hand.
So having a robust form to a language is a good point, but please make
it optional, non ambiguous and cheap in term of keywords.
Example of proposition:
match ... with
...
end of match
Sometimes, I think that programming languages should have a "sort" of
normal form using XML or s-expression. Even in this case I would
prefer s-expressions rather than the too heavy too close XML syntax.
[...]
> I actually like the idea used in Haskell and Python:
> visual block structure (indent/undent). The problem
> is it doesn't scale very well to great depths and long
> bits of code .. you need to de-localise the code or
> switch to free form (resp).
Using indentation, is sometimes pretty cool, but having it optional
(like in Haskell) is better.
In fact I don't really like in programming languages, but in data
languages I find it costless (YAML).
> > Having "endmatch", "endif", ... is really too boring.
>
> It is a bit.. but Ocaml is worse, because when you do
> need a specific close point, you have to edit the start
> as well:
>
> match .. with ...... (* goes forever *)
>
> is rewritten as
>
> begin match .. with ... end
>
> which is quite painful.
It's a mistake.
In a future language it will be
match ... with ... end
> > IMHO the readability don't doesn't apply on these construct since they
> > should be short sized in clean code.
>
> That's a reasonable position..
>
> > It's more about closing classes,
> > modules... And here I prefer comments:
>
> .. heh .. and in these cases Felix uses { } .. so actually
> Felix has it backwards. The long constructions don't get terminated
> with heavy terminators as they should, whereas the light ones do
> when they shouldn't.
Indeed that's funny.
--
Nicolas Pouillard
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