Re: Use of punctuation in a language?

I built a simple parser that makes some puntuation optional. Sometimes
it's really nice but sometimes you can hang yourself. Be careful with
unary operators that can be confused as binary opeators:
      if a<b -3 c=d
could mean
      if( a<b) -3; c=d
or
        if(a<b-3) c=d
which is exactly what John said.


This example blows up because -3 is a valid statement. If you ran it
through bison with the glr option on it would complain that the grammar
is ambiguous (and I'm being ambiguous about what it is because I think
it won't complain until you run the string to be parsed through). If you
can come up with a non-ambiguous grammar then it would probably be
really nice to use. I can't type special characters without looking at
the keyboard so I'd like it.


Matt




Herbert wrote:
> Does anyone have any comments on the use of punctucation is a
> language, ...


> [ Having used languages in which any string of characters is a valid
> program, I can report that I vastly prefer languages with punctuation
> because they make it harder to write a program that is syntactically
> valid but doesn't mean what I wanted it to. It's a little easier for
> compilers to parse languages with statement separators and explicit
> brackets, but I don't find that anywhere near as compelling as the
> human factors involved. -John]

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