Re: Pronouns in programming language?

Axel Schairer <schairer@dai.ed.ac.uk>
3 Mar 2000 08:59:43 -0500

          From comp.compilers

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From: Axel Schairer <schairer@dai.ed.ac.uk>
Newsgroups: comp.compilers
Date: 3 Mar 2000 08:59:43 -0500
Organization: Dept of Artificial Intelligence, Edinburgh University, Scotland
References: 00-02-149 00-02-154
Keywords: design, Lisp

pwagle@my-deja.com writes:
> I've also heard that some languages have experimented with permitting
> n-ary comparisons (eg, "1 < x < 10" instead of "x > 1 && x < 10", but
> they always conclude that its a mistake. Hard to understand code gets
> produced, and I think there's a parsing problem, but I forget what.


Lisp has that for many operators and comparisons: (+ x1 x2 x3 x4),
(< x1 x2 x3 x4), and so on. I certainly have never heard that this
was considered a mistake in the lisp community. But then, because of
lisp's syntax, there is no parsing problem here at all.


I would be interested in knowing which other problems you have thought
or heard of, in particular, is the code hard to understand because of
the parsing problems (for the programmer), or are there other issues
involved?


Axel


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