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From: Robert A Duff <bobduff@world.std.com>
Subject: Re: Problem trying to implement generics.
Sender: bobduff@world.std.com (Robert A Duff)
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Date: Tue, 24 Apr 2001 01:15:34 GMT
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Date: 2001-04-24T01:15:34+00:00
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Brian Rogoff <bpr@shell5.ba.best.com> 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.

> > 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?

> > 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.  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.

> > BTW, I wish ASCII had left and right double-quote characters.  That
> > would be much more civilized.
> 
> Oh well. Maybe the decision to restrict a language to ASCII will be viewed
> in the future like Ada's current restrictions. There are certainly glyphs 
> that I'd use if I could but I think ASCII is a fair restriction for the 
> lexemes of the surface syntax of a language. 

Sigh.  Maybe when Unicode is uniformly supported by all hardware and
software...

- Bob