Re: Have we reached the asymptotic plateau of innovation in programming language design?

On Wed, 21 Mar 2012 11:53:35 +0100, Torben Fgidius Mogensen wrote:


> That is a
> fairly neat idea, and by allowing all combinations of characters from a
> subset of the non-alphanumeric characters in operator names, you also
> avoid C's problem of parsing +++: It is parsed as a single operator, and
> if it is not defined in the program, that is reported as an error.


A better approach is restricted association rules requiring explicit
brackets when some operands are shared by some operators. Typically it is
the cases like:


      A and B or C
      -x^y


etc. This method will work here as well. Provided, there are


1. infix +
2. prefix ++
3. postfix ++


The rule would be that 1 cannot be associated with either 2 or 3. This
would make both interpretations illegal:


      a ++ + b (a is shared by 3 and 1)
      a + ++ b (b is shared by 1 and 2)


So the programmer would have to use brackets to disambiguate:


      (a++) + b
      a + (++ b)


--
Regards,
Dmitry A. Kazakov
http://www.dmitry-kazakov.de

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