On Thursday 02 June 2005 16:12, Marco van de Voort wrote: > > > Begin..End is redundant - you have to indent them to make em > > > readable anyways. > > > > No. This makes the code more readable like normal english text. It > > states much more clearly what it intents, at least much more than > > just indenting or putting curly braces around it. > > Not every syntax is about minimizing code or readability.
The latter it should. > Some are > also to simply simplify parsing (and that is about compiler > developer, but to make the language more internally consistent) and > avoid long lookaheads. These things combined also improve quality of > error messages a lot. Well, it is still named "begin", "end", not "x0x0x0" "0x0x0x", is it? ;-) And for the compiler: it wouldn't make a difference if you'd parse "begin end" or "curly braces" tokens, would it? > > > Maintenance is easier as their is less redundancy. > > > > It simply depends on the kind of redundancy. > > > > For instance, "type" and "var" keywords are just redundant, the > > compiler could figure it out by itself, still they serve a useful > > purpose. > > See above. Yes, it might make the compiler writer's job easier. But typically you don't design a language around a compiler. And I strongly doubt that Wirth did. Vinzent. -- public key: http://www.t-domaingrabbing.ch/publickey.asc _______________________________________________ fpc-devel maillist - fpc-devel@lists.freepascal.org http://lists.freepascal.org/mailman/listinfo/fpc-devel