Lukas Renggli wrote:
>> Now could not we have 3?
>>         3
>>         do 1 (ie no preference) but transform the code from _ into := 
>> automatically.
>> It would be really great in fact
> 
> That would be the magic solution :-)
> 
> The problem is that it would not be clear how to parse a_1. Is it the
> assignment of 1 to a or the access of the variable a_1?
> 
> I don't like the proposal of requiring a delimiter before and after an
> underscore assignment: (1) there is existing code where this is not
> the case, 

A small minority of code, surely?

> (2) it complicates the scanning significantly, the same
> token represents different things depending on context and an extended
> lookahead is required to parse it, 

I'm afraid I'm not seeing this point. From a brief look at the scanner, 
it appears that allowing := assignment did complicate the scanner 
somewhat, but that allowing _ to mean assignment should be similar 
complexity and still only require one-char lookahead. But perhaps I'm 
missing something.

> and (3) it allows that people
> continue to use crappy underscore assignments, there will be a mess
> forever.

I can't (and don't want to) argue with that :-)
I'll gladly accept "we don't want to allow underscore assignment" as an 
argument, I'm not so sure about the "it's hard" argument.

Regards,

-Martin


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