Re: language design tradeoffs

tmb@arolla.idiap.ch (Thomas M. Breuel) writes:
> raveling@Unify.com (Paul Raveling) writes:
> Actually I like the idea of using EOL rather than ;. ...


> In my experience, explicitly terminating statements with something like
> ";", or even better, explicitly bracketing each statement (as in Lisp), is
> the most effective syntax for protecting you from typos and slips.


My opinion probably differs because my experience differs.
A practical example more closely akin to a compiler language
without ;'s would be any of several assembly languages of the '60's,
with much-used macro facilities and EOL as a statement terminator.
In some cases people even used macros to define limited versions
of HLL features for machine language programming.


One of the ironies of the shift from assembly language programming
to higher level languages is that macro processing capability
has diminished over time, not just in the higher level languages
but also in many of the more recent assembly languages.


P.S.: My nomination for biggest typo/slip trap in any language
would be use of the '.' operator in BLISS.




------------------
Paul Raveling
Raveling@Unify.com
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