At 03:35 PM 9/27/00 -0400, John Porter wrote:
>Piers Cawley wrote:
> >
> > You know, I'm trying to see what's annoying about all those
> > parentheses in the lisp function and what do you know, I can't see
> > anything wrong. Okay, so it's not Perl syntax, but it's still clear
> > what's going on.
>
>Yes, but it's hard to read. Lisp requires parens, because it
>has no precedence rules. (Well, hardly any). It has (almost)
>no other syntax. This is the situation we would like to avoid
>in perl. By letting every operator have well-defined precedence,
>and every be function well prototyped, there should never be any
>ambiguity (to the compiler, at least) as to what is meant, even
>with no parens. Ideally, anyway.
While Perl -lets- every function be well prototyped, it doesn't -require-
every function to be well prototyped. Because of this, it might be well
nigh impossible to eliminate all ambiguity to the compiler.
>--
>John Porter
>
> Aus des Weltalls ferne funken Radiosterne.
