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From: craig@comp.lancs.ac.uk (Craig Wylie)
Newsgroups: net.lang
Subject: Re: Discussion on removing punctuation in programming languages
Message-ID: <533@comp.lancs.ac.uk>
Date: Fri, 31-Oct-86 07:25:12 EST
Article-I.D.: comp.533
Posted: Fri Oct 31 07:25:12 1986
Date-Received: Wed, 5-Nov-86 06:14:28 EST
References: <21836@rochester.ARPA>
Reply-To: craig@comp.lancs.ac.uk (Craig Wylie)
Organization: Department of Computing at Lancaster University, UK.
Lines: 33

In article <21836@rochester.ARPA> ken@rochester.UUCP (Comfy chair) writes:
>
>.... In interactive systems, it may even be easier
>to do it with indentation.  (I know of one language that uses
>indentation, actually.)

Miranda uses indentation  --  if you know of any other interactive languages
using indentation let me know.  Occam uses indentation but is compiled.

The indentation scheme in Occam is forced on the user as two spaces per level
while Miranda uses the offside rule (Peter Landin's idea I believe).


One of the big problems with indentation as a structure notation is that
of multi line statements.  The suggestion of using a backslash at the end
of a line to be continued just feels like a backward step. I know it is used
in many UNIX utilities (ie make and sh) but that doesn't mean it is elegant :-).
I can not help but feel that continuation symbols in a programming language
should be left in Fortran.  We should be looking for a way of automatically
determining structure. It should be possible for a parser to determine if
the next line is a continuation. A combination of indentation and whether
the next input token would be legal as a continuation should be enough.

Cetainly Syntax directed editors would make things much easier.

Craig.

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