shivers@A.GP.CS.CMU.EDU (Olin Shivers) (09/20/90)
Date: 18 Sep 90 17:48:51 GMT
From: Cliff Click <news@rice.edu>
Subject: Virtues of ML syntax
I've done some Scheme programming, darn little ML programming and scads
of C/Fortran/Pascal/etc programming. I find ML syntax to be incredibly
unreadable, while Scheme & C syntax isn't that bad.
One of the authors of *The Definition of Standard ML* is a friend of mine,
and I have heard him complain about getting tripped up by little oddities
in the syntax. If the syntax causes trouble for one of the guys that actually
defined the language, that's an indicator to me that maybe it could
have been better designed.
I like lisp syntax myself, because you can extend it with macros.
Notational engineering, while certainly abusable, is an important
tool in a software engineer's bag of tricks.
-Olinramsdell@mitre.org (John D. Ramsdell) (09/21/90)
Date: 18 Sep 90 17:48:51 GMT
From: Cliff Click <news@rice.edu>
Subject: Virtues of ML syntax
I've done some Scheme programming, darn little ML programming and scads
of C/Fortran/Pascal/etc programming. I find ML syntax to be incredibly
unreadable, while Scheme & C syntax isn't that bad.
ML syntax reminds me of Pascal syntax in the following way. Pascal
syntax was designed to be parsable by a recursive decent parser which
was written in Pascal. Likewise, the ML syntax seems to me to have
been designed to be machine readable instead of human readable.
Notice the large number of keywords and the lack of a closing marker
after the match production in the ML grammar. I suspect Haskell is an
improvement although it mixes up the traditional usages of ":" and "::".
In article <9009200443.aa24008@mc.lcs.mit.edu> shivers@A.GP.CS.CMU.EDU (Olin Shivers) writes:
I like lisp syntax myself, because you can extend it with macros.
Notational engineering, while certainly abusable, is an important
tool in a software engineer's bag of tricks.
-Olin
I like lisp syntax even when I do not use any macros. I especially
appreciate lisp syntax when I write C programs. In my opinion,
regular syntax is easier to understand.