Re: problems with identifiers and keywords...

Carl Cerecke <cdc@maxnet.co.nz>
1 Dec 2004 23:14:35 -0500

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Related articles
[18 earlier articles]
Re: problems with identifiers and keywords... Martin.Ward@durham.ac.uk (Martin Ward) (2004-11-19)
Re: problems with identifiers and keywords... Peter_Flass@Yahoo.com (Peter Flass) (2004-11-20)
Re: problems with identifiers and keywords... genew@mail.ocis.net (Gene Wirchenko) (2004-11-20)
Re: problems with identifiers and keywords... david.thompson1@worldnet.att.net (Dave Thompson) (2004-11-28)
Re: problems with identifiers and keywords... cgweav@aol.com (2004-11-29)
Re: problems with identifiers and keywords... nmm1@cus.cam.ac.uk (2004-12-01)
Re: problems with identifiers and keywords... cdc@maxnet.co.nz (Carl Cerecke) (2004-12-01)
Re: problems with identifiers and keywords... gah@ugcs.caltech.edu (glen herrmannsfeldt) (2004-12-05)
Re: problems with identifiers and keywords... vbdis@aol.com (2004-12-05)
| List of all articles for this month |

From: Carl Cerecke <cdc@maxnet.co.nz>
Newsgroups: comp.compilers
Date: 1 Dec 2004 23:14:35 -0500
Organization: TelstraClear
References: 04-11-031 04-11-123
Keywords: syntax, design
Posted-Date: 01 Dec 2004 23:14:35 EST

Clayton Weaver wrote:
>>For example, SGML put markup in <> delimiters (whence HTML and now XML
>>does the same). However, SGML recognized that < and > might be useful
>>in text and allowed one to use some notation I forget to change the
>>delimiters.
>
> This general problem has annoyed me for a long time. I always thought
> that a wise thing to do when ucs-4 and utf-8 character encodings came
> into general use would be to define an arbitrary "NTD" (non-text
> delimiter) character value and give it an arbitrary glyph not found in
> any real natural language or in mathematics.


And therein lies the problem. Once you use your NTD glyph in a
language, it is no longer an arbitrary glyph not found in any language
- you've just created a language that uses it! If you then want to
describe that language within itself, you need a special
representation of the NTD. And we are back at square one. Might as
well just use a common, generic, overloaded delimiter: ()[]{}<>,
because that is what an NTD would become anyway.


Cheers,
Carl.


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