Re: language design tradeoffs

rob@guinness.eng.ohio-state.edu (Rob Carriere) writes:
> [... make ] the statement
>inside the if/do a block; i.e. always use {} or BEGIN/END or whatever it's
>called in the language of the week.
>
>In fact, I would argue that a language that requires coding that way has
>superior syntax to a do/od language, because of the well-known problem
>with the spelling of the terminators. [...]


But syntactically it really doesn't matter whether the "if"
statement looks like:


if this then that fi
if this then that endif
if this then begin that end
if (this) { that; }


or whatever; they are all just different ways of spelling delimiters.
Of course, it may (well) affect human readability, and it may (well)
affect the quality of error diagnostics; and if symbols are overloaded
the lexer may have difficulty recognising "){" as "then".


The real distinction is in a mind-set. There are those who think
of the controlled *statement* of an "if"; and those who think of the
controlled *block* of an "if". There are so many problems with statements
in such contexts that blocks are clearly superior; it is a pity that
most of the popular languages use statements.


--
Andy Walker, Maths Dept., Nott'm Univ., UK.
anw@maths.nott.ac.uk


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