From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 X-Spam-Checker-Version: SpamAssassin 3.4.4 (2020-01-24) on polar.synack.me X-Spam-Level: X-Spam-Status: No, score=-1.9 required=5.0 tests=BAYES_00 autolearn=ham autolearn_force=no version=3.4.4 X-Google-Language: ENGLISH,ASCII-7-bit X-Google-Thread: 103376,ad988eb0a9545c86 X-Google-Attributes: gid103376,public X-Google-ArrivalTime: 2001-04-23 19:00:32 PST Path: newsfeed.google.com!newsfeed.stanford.edu!news-spur1.maxwell.syr.edu!news.maxwell.syr.edu!iad-peer.news.verio.net!news.verio.net!sea-read.news.verio.net.POSTED!not-for-mail Newsgroups: comp.lang.ada From: Brian Rogoff Subject: Re: Problem trying to implement generics. In-Reply-To: Message-ID: References: <3ADC4320.7ACA3DEC@averstar.com> <9bhoup$h9k$1@taliesin.netcom.net.uk> <3ADC7A79.8E853905@mindspring.com> <9bi7vb$9j7$1@taliesin.netcom.net.uk> <9bpacv$86n$2@a1-hrz.uni-duisburg.de> MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII Date: Tue, 24 Apr 2001 02:00:26 GMT NNTP-Posting-Host: 206.184.139.136 X-Complaints-To: abuse@verio.net X-Trace: sea-read.news.verio.net 988077626 206.184.139.136 (Tue, 24 Apr 2001 02:00:26 GMT) NNTP-Posting-Date: Tue, 24 Apr 2001 02:00:26 GMT Organization: Verio Xref: newsfeed.google.com comp.lang.ada:6873 Date: 2001-04-24T02:00:26+00:00 List-Id: On Tue, 24 Apr 2001, Robert A Duff wrote: > Brian Rogoff writes: > > > How about just using the {} and having an optional } if; syntax? > > I suppose it's just a matter of taste, but I find "} if;" distasteful. I was trying to capture the readability of the Ada end ...; constructions, which I miss in other languages, with some suitability as a very lightweight delimiter, useable even with inline function definitions. Could be an overconstrained problem. > > > And probably the {...} syntax couldn't have other control structures > > > nested inside it -- it's only allowed for the innermost thing. > > > > > > Good idea? > > > > I don't like it. > > Why? I generally don't like fairly arbitrary restrictions like that one. Why not allow nesting {}? I have philosophically similar objections to automatically "use"ing infix operators. I prefer to handle operators like other functions. > > > Oh, and I'd like my editor to automatically convert from one to the > > > other as "..." grows or shrinks. > > > > At this point, I say adopt indentation for block structure. > > But indentation only marks the *beginning* of the thing. > > > Funny you mentioned that, I've started using LaTeX again. Sometimes the > > old ways are better :-). > > It amazes me that Knuth, who is orders of magnitude smarter than me, can > design such an awful language. Language design is a skill, and just becuase someone excels in some subset of talents doesn't necessarily mean they are skilled everywhere. Remember, Knuth still uses a mock assembly language to describe algorithms in this books. Yuck! I agree TeX and LaTeX suck as languages, but the TeX program is very cool and I really prefer it to may of the WYSIWYG tools I suffered through before my return to the LaTeX fold. > Writing TeX is like writing an > assembly-language program to generate a document. Except TeX is more > error-prone than most assembly languages. LaTeX is like programming in > a *macro* assembly language, which has some advantages, but causes all > error messages to be totally incomprehensible. That's all true, and I'd probably use Lout but for all of the other reasons we use a piece of software. Besides, I much prefer it to the commercial offerings. -- Brian