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Posting-Version: version B 2.10.2 9/18/84; site looking.UUCP
Path: utzoo!watmath!looking!brad
From: brad@looking.UUCP (Brad Templeton)
Newsgroups: net.lang
Subject: Re: More (ad nauseum) on removing punctuation in programming languages
Message-ID: <694@looking.UUCP>
Date: Sat, 25-Oct-86 16:41:35 EST
Article-I.D.: looking.694
Posted: Sat Oct 25 16:41:35 1986
Date-Received: Sun, 26-Oct-86 02:21:22 EST
References: <21836@rochester.ARPA> <2642@hammer.TEK.COM>
Reply-To: brad@looking.UUCP (Brad Templeton)
Organization: Looking Glass Software Ltd. Waterloo, Ontario
Lines: 27
Summary: 

In article <2642@hammer.TEK.COM> andrew@hammer.UUCP writes:
>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!

True, and very important.  Indentation is guaranteed to balance out by the
end of the program.  There's no such thing as an error, as far as the compiler
can detect (except in a few cases where extra keywords like else appear).

If you're using a regular text editor, using indentation can be very dangerous.
As Mr. Klossner suggests, the correct suggestion is to use both closers and
indentation, redundantly.  Since the indentation supplies the visual cues,
the closers should be unobtrusive, but present.
>
>These syntactic sugar discussions (how do you spell block begin/end?)
>are the least interesting and most trivial part of language design.

Anything that people want to debate is (I say by definition) and important
issue in language design.  For a language to be good, it must be liked.
If there is something, even syntactic sugar, that has a strong affect on
public perception of the language, it is an important issue.

One of the primary purposes of high level languages is human readability.
That's what syntax is all about.

-- 
Brad Templeton, Looking Glass Software Ltd. - Waterloo, Ontario 519/884-7473