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From: wmb@MITCH.ENG.SUN.COM (Mitch Bradley)
Newsgroups: comp.lang.forth
Subject: Syntax
Message-ID: <9103031940.AA02024@ucbvax.Berkeley.EDU>
Date: 2 Mar 91 01:37:09 GMT
Sender: daemon@ucbvax.BERKELEY.EDU
Reply-To: Mitch Bradley <wmb%MITCH.ENG.SUN.COM@SCFVM.GSFC.NASA.GOV>
Organization: The Internet
Lines: 29

> > ... syntax is a waste of time
>
>     What a lame thing to say! (esp. comming from someone who I agree
>     with 98% of the time)  Syntax is a major conveyor of meaning.  How
>     could anything be communicated (esp. programs) without syntax? Forth
>     may have flexible syntax, but it definitely has syntax.

More precisely, when I said "syntax", I meant "non-trivial syntax, and the
parsers that are required to evaluate it".

The dividing line between "trivial syntax" and "non-trivial syntax" is
open to argument, but in my book, Forth syntax is clearly in the trivial
category.  "Proof": I can describe the entire Forth lexical analyser/parser
to any half-decent programmer in less than 5 minutes, without using any
big words.  I don't need to talk about break sets or scan sets or
context free grammars or left recursion or recursive descent or LR-K
or production rules or any of those other things in order to describe
Forth's syntax or its parser.

Before I got turned on to Forth, I used to spend lots of effort defining
command syntaxes with commas and colons and brackets and optional fields
and stuff.  Now I just write Forth words that do one thing and are finished.

To my way of thinking, any syntax more complicated than what Forth already
has is probably too complicated.  I would even claim that Forth has a
bit too much syntax (for example, the Forth control structures are sort
of syntactic in nature; PostScript shows how to avoid that syntax).

Mitch