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From: ken@rochester.ARPA (Comfy chair)
Newsgroups: net.lang
Subject: Re: Discussion on removing punctuation in programming languages
Message-ID: <21836@rochester.ARPA>
Date: Wed, 22-Oct-86 11:40:17 EDT
Article-I.D.: rocheste.21836
Posted: Wed Oct 22 11:40:17 1986
Date-Received: Wed, 22-Oct-86 23:00:55 EDT
Reply-To: ken@rochester.UUCP (Comfy chair)
Organization: U of Rochester, CS Dept, Rochester, NY
Lines: 30

References:


Let's follow a more productive line of discussion (or argument :-)):

In a previous article I said that punctuation was needed by parsers for
various reasons. What I failed to mention and what some other people
pointed out is that other things can be made the cues instead of
punctuation, like indentation. All you have to do in conventional
parser technology is to make these explicit tokens instead of
whitespace to be ignored. In interactive systems, it may even be easier
to do it with indentation.  (I know of one language that uses
indentation, actually.)

Now I think this is an idea with promise but let's not jump into this
blindly. I think a discussion about the ramifications is worthwhile.

I can think up of several things:

1. What do you do about tabs? Are they equivalent to space to the next
stop or what? What happens if you move to another environment with
different tab stops? (One solution, use tabs only.)

2. What do you do when the user runs out of intermediate columns to add
another level of nesting? Sort of like running out of numbers for lines
in BASIC. (One solution, automatic reformatting.)

Well, I think that gives you the idea. There are more good new ideas to
be explored instead of flaming each other about the right way it used
to be done, etc. Language design isn't dead yet. Let's have more
ideas.

	Ken