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From: andrew@hammer.UUCP
Newsgroups: net.lang
Subject: More (ad nauseum) on removing punctuation in programming languages
Message-ID: <2642@hammer.TEK.COM>
Date: Fri, 24-Oct-86 11:49:09 EST
Article-I.D.: hammer.2642
Posted: Fri Oct 24 11:49:09 1986
Date-Received: Sun, 26-Oct-86 01:29:14 EST
References: <21836@rochester.ARPA>
Organization: Tektronix, Inc., Wilsonville, OR
Lines: 20

If you think it's easy to misplace a curly brace, you ain't seen
nothing until you go looking for the subtle program misbehavior caused
by incorrect indentation!

An alternate proposal, which would lead to a more redundant, robust
language, would be to require that the programmer use BOTH punctuation
and indentation.  If one or the other is omitted, the compiler can
sense and publish the error.

	"Language design isn't dead yet."

These syntactic sugar discussions (how do you spell block begin/end?)
are the least interesting and most trivial part of language design.  If
you're interested in language design-by-committee, check out your
favorite ANSI standards group.  There are still a lot of meaty issues
to argue over.

  -=- Andrew Klossner	(vice chair, ANSI BASIC committee)
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