Re: What attributes of a programming language simplify its use?

gah4 <gah4@u.washington.edu>
Sat, 3 Dec 2022 17:15:55 -0800 (PST)

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What attributes of a programming language simplify its use? gah4@u.washington.edu (gah4) (2022-12-01)
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From: gah4 <gah4@u.washington.edu>
Newsgroups: comp.compilers
Date: Sat, 3 Dec 2022 17:15:55 -0800 (PST)
Organization: Compilers Central
References: 22-12-001 22-12-005
Injection-Info: gal.iecc.com; posting-host="news.iecc.com:2001:470:1f07:1126:0:676f:7373:6970"; logging-data="82631"; mail-complaints-to="abuse@iecc.com"
Keywords: syntax
Posted-Date: 03 Dec 2022 23:00:17 EST
In-Reply-To: 22-12-005

On Saturday, December 3, 2022 at 4:27:51 PM UTC-8, christoph...@compiler-resources.com wrote:
> The discussion on reserved words versus keywords reminds me of
> decisions we made while building Yacc++. It is worth noting that we
> (both of its developers) worked at Pr1me computer where PL/I dialects
> were the key programming language used in build both the OS and the
> compilers, so we were likely highly influenced by that.


This is reminding me of some cases in TeX where optional keywords can
arise in unexpected places. There is TeX glue that allows:


\hskip 1cm


or


\hskip 1cm plus 1cm


In normal use, you mix TeX commands and text to be formatted. If a macro
expands to


\hskip 1cm


and is followed by text starting with


plus


you get a surprising error message.


I believe that plus is only a "reserved word" in that specific context.


And a project I was working on some years ago, just happened to run
into that case, however unlikely that might be.

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