Re: The semicolon habit (was: Q: Definition

Mark Lutz (lutz@KaPRE.COM) wrote:


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


: But why must writing programs be like writing a document with a
: markup language? IMHO, we already have plenty of problems with
: maintainability as it is.


To diverge slightly; Algol68 took a slightly different approach and
didn't use generic brackets. It used if ... fi, case ... esac, do ... od.
It intially looks ugly but you get used to it in a few days and it is easier
than { ... } and there are fewer mistakes. No what the @#$% does }
supposed to match. No missing brackets. Overloading of syntatic marks
causes mistakes, like the comma, semicolon, less-than-greater-than, of C++.


Ken Walter
[Comment That's a good point, but what about Algol68's extremely overloaded
punctuation that let you write if a then b else c fi as (a|b|c) ?
tnemmoC -John]
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