Re: simple vs complex languages

bear@sonic.net wrote:


>And now I just use parens as
>part of those operators because I don't want to sweat out some obscure
>bug caused by me taking one view of how something would be parsed and
>the compiler taking another (my LISP background shows here, I guess).


This is true of many people, not just those exposed to Lisp. One
interesting datapoint is Smalltalk; the message-passing "grammar",
combined with sensibly chosen methods names, means that programs often
"read well", at least for people familiar with English. One problem
with C, C++, and Java are the gratuitous prefix operators -- if
type-casting were infix instead of suffix, you would not to worry
about its precedence compared to dereference, function application, or
array indexing (and it looks much more like message passing). The
same goes for address-of -- if you wrote expr.address or even expr.&,
you would not need to worry about precedence in something like
bar.&[1] versus bar[1].& -- it would come from the order.


David Chase

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