Re: language design tradeoffs [macro mayhem]

tgl+@cs.cmu.edu (Tom Lane) writes:
|> The real reason that this is such a pain is not macros, it's C's
|> misbegotten syntax. If semicolons were statement separators (a la Pascal)
|> instead of statement terminators, things would work a lot more smoothly.


I can't agree less. The semicolon as statement separator in Pascal can get
to be a real bug sometimes. It also leads to syntactic nonsense. This
compound statement:


begin
x := y;;;;
end


is composed of 5 statements: the assignement plus a null statement after
each semicolon. Let's please have a semicolon terminator and an explicit
null statement as in Ada.
--
# Andrew Dunstan
# Department of Computer Science
# University of Adelaide
# South Australia
# net: andrewd@cs.adelaide.edu.au
[The semicolon as separator (Algol60) vs. as terminator (PL/I) is an old
argument that we're not going to resolve here. My impression is that the
Algol approach is more elegant and makes source transformations, including
macro expansion, easier, while the PL/I approach is easier for humans to
write. Neither is unambiguously better; one's preference usually depends on
what one learned first. Personally, I think that the obvious and intuitive
way to indicate continuations is to put a digit after the initial tab. -John]
--

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