Re: The semicolon habit (was: Q: Definition of a scripting lang.)

Charles Fiterman <cef@geodesic.com> writes:
> Further I find {} silly. Everyone in their right mind indents. Count
> indentation from the leftmost character of the previous line. Either
> eliminate tabs as valid within programs or give them some standard
> meaning like a tab takes you to the nearest 4's boundary.


That's fine as long as you write the program.


I often have to generate programs. In particular, I don't even
generate the programs itself, but generate a pre-program that uses
refinements to specify the bits and pieces that gets inserted in a
common skeleton. (E.g., literate programming systems like noweb or
nuweb may be (mis)used for that.) Preprocessors create the actual
program that gets compiled.


In such circumstances it's a Bad Thing(tm) if white space in general
(and particularily indentation) is used to specify control flow. It
would get messed up much too often.


The markup language crowd learned it's lesson long ago: Please, no
optical markup. Add explicite tags to your document. Why don't we
stay with that?


Cheers,
Joachim
=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=
Joachim Schrod Email: schrod@iti.informatik.th-darmstadt.de
Computer Science Department
Technical University of Darmstadt, Germany
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