Thien-Thi Nguyen wrote:
Tom Hawkins <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes:
All comments are welcome.
disclaimer: i like parentheses.
maybe it would be better to use simple paired-one-character delimiters (like parens, or {} or []) and prefix operators for structure, so that the question of how to parse a properly nested form is already answered.
Why? We've now had 30 (40?) years of compiler-generator development effort. Why use a form whose only purpose is to simplify human-generated parsers, when it's so easy to do it properly?
what lies inside those forms is where the design effort (for a new format) really ought to focus, IMHO. for structure, combination of curly braces plus "begin/end"-style blocks plus infix notation means another few months playing w/ (and debugging) lex/yacc or dedicated parsing library only to discover underspecification later which results in another few years of retrograde hacking or another few layers of compensating syntax (followed by retrograde hacking anyway).
I'm not sure what your point is - are you suggesting a hand-coded parser?
Sure, I don't mind parentheses. I'm not a LISP/emacs expert -- what is the colon for, such as (:scope ...). Why not just (add 8 ...)
Also, how should lists of numbers be distinguished from functions?
'(2 6 0) or (quote (2 6 0))
My 2c on XML/emacs/lisp. Nothing in either XML or Lisp is remotely relevant to what you need to do; just do what's natural. Nobody in their right mind is going to start parsing your netlists using emacs or prettifying their code using Mozilla. Ticking hacker's boxes is not going to help to get your product out there and working.
Evan
