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From: bzs@bu-cs.BU.EDU (Barry Shein)
Newsgroups: net.lang
Subject: Discussion on removing punctuation in programming languages
Message-ID: <1821@bu-cs.bu-cs.BU.EDU>
Date: Sat, 11-Oct-86 18:02:55 EDT
Article-I.D.: bu-cs.1821
Posted: Sat Oct 11 18:02:55 1986
Date-Received: Sat, 11-Oct-86 22:02:26 EDT
Organization: Boston U. Comp. Sci.
Lines: 27


This comes up fairly often, doesn't it?

In teaching University courses I've observed that people find the
'separator' approach very confusing (I refer to our Intro Pascal
course as "Semicolons 101") while those languages which use them as
terminators (C, PL/I) people seem to find fairly intuitive (I've
taught programming here at BU in Asm, PL/I, Pascal and C, as well as
Survey of Programming Languages where I have taught a lot of others,
fast!) I remember when people started discovering "free-format"
languages (well, more or less, let's say I watched communities migrate
from Fortran, Cobol and Assembler in the mid-late 70's), I think they
preferred the free format approach even if they had to now understand
semi-colons (usually, of course Cobol had both format restrictions and
the '.'  terminator.)

Some statements need to be broken into several lines, either you
will have to re-introduce the 'continuation' syntax a la Fortran
(*some* improvement) or impose other convolutions on your language
to make sure you can parse multi-line lines unambiguously (eg. not
allowing assignment within an expression.)

I personally think you are solving a non-problem tho I encourage you
to experiment. It's languages which use punctuations as separators
that are the real problem, not the punctuations.

	-Barry Shein, Boston University