Path: utzoo!utgpu!news-server.csri.toronto.edu!cs.utexas.edu!sdd.hp.com!hplabs!otter.hpl.hp.com!hpltoad!cdollin!kers From: kers@hplb.hpl.hp.com (Chris Dollin) Newsgroups: comp.lang.misc Subject: Re: Re: improve world by dropping languages with ; Message-ID: Date: 26 Feb 91 13:40:22 GMT References: <1991Feb25.173154.29456@linus.mitre.org> <3024@charon.cwi.nl> Sender: news@hplb.hpl.hp.com (Usenet News Administrator) Organization: Hewlett-Packard Laboratories, Bristol, UK. Lines: 30 In-Reply-To: guido@cwi.nl's message of 25 Feb 91 22:07:53 GMT Nntp-Posting-Host: cdollin.hpl.hp.com Guido van Rossum writes: john@mingus.mitre.org (John D. Burger) writes: >I have very strong intuitions about stylistic things >like indenting. One of these intuitions is that it's impossible to >legislate style. Oh? I've never heard anybody request the right to define their own string quotes or reserved words (for example) in a programming language. You take what the language gives you, period. You can (and I do) define your own keywords in Pop11. Defining your own string quotes would be harder (because the tokenisation procedure is a constant, not a variable, and writing tokenisers is boring). And there's Forth, too: you can define your own keywords there (loosely speaking, anyway; they're just "ordinary" words to Forth). Lisp macros are (in a reasonable sense) equivant to new keywords (ie, they can introduce new language constructs). That's three languages which given counterexamples of varying strengths. Any more? -- Regards, Kers. | "You're better off not dreaming of the things to come; Caravan: | Dreams are always ending far too soon."