Re: The semicolon habit (was: Q: Definition

our moderator comments:
>[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]


What about it?


Firstly, allowing you to write "if ... fi" in an alternate form is
surely *under*loading. It allows the user to use "elegant variation" in
styles to make meanings clearer -- you can use, for example, vertically
aligned "if ... fi" for major blocks of code, horizontally aligned
"if ... fi" for key single-line code, and "(...)" for trivia that you
want to slip into place without drawing the reader's attention.


Secondly, the meat of your point [which ISTR you have made before]
is presumably that the *compiler* [and hence the reader] finds it quite
hard to tell whether a left parenthesis is meant to be "(", "[", "if",
"case" or "begin". But it doesn't matter! They are all brackets; and
that in itself is quite an insight for the reader -- one that many more
recent languages have failed to notice [or to exploit].


--
Andy Walker, Maths Dept., Nott'm Univ., UK.
anw@maths.nott.ac.uk


[Agreed, it's not important whether it's hard to compile, but it
seems to me that you could get some hard to find program errors by misplacing
a vertical bar and turning a case into an if or v.v. -John]
--

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