Re: language design tradeoffs

drw@euclid.mit.edu (Dale R. Worley)
Wed, 16 Sep 1992 17:06:43 GMT

          From comp.compilers
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Re: language design tradeoffs weberwu@inf.fu-berlin.de (1992-09-13)
Re: language design tradeoffs rob@guinness.eng.ohio-state.edu (1992-09-14)
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[24 later articles]
| List of all articles for this month |
Newsgroups: comp.compilers,comp.human-factors
From: drw@euclid.mit.edu (Dale R. Worley)
Organization: MIT Dept. of Tetrapilotomy, Cambridge, MA, USA
Date: Wed, 16 Sep 1992 17:06:43 GMT
Keywords: design
References: 92-09-048 92-09-070

The moderator writes:
    [Algol68 came close to TNEMMOC, but also did an amazing job of letting you
    use parentheses, vertical bars, and the like, as synonyms for if, else, fi,
    begin, end, and other common delimiters. -John]


And boy does it make parsing '(' tricky!


Although such constructions *are* easier to read, in small sections of
code, such as 1 or 2 lines. For anything longer, it is much better to use
the keywords.


As a language design issue, I guess I have to agree that providing the
alternate forms is a good thing for humans, provided they use the
appropriate alternative in each place. But it's hard on the compiler.


Dale Worley Dept. of Math., MIT drw@math.mit.edu
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