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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: Fri, 20 Apr 2001 23:02:57 GMT
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Date: 2001-04-20T23:02:57+00:00
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Brian Rogoff <bpr@shell5.ba.best.com> writes:

> Well, the whole thing is somewhat whimsical. I personally prefer this
> aspect of Ada syntax but it's very, very low on my list, so if I were 
> voting on some new language design I'd probably vote to keep begin-end 
> but if the rest of the world wants {} instead so be it. 

I agree that it's not the most important thing.

One thing I've considered is having two alternate syntaxes for the
various control structures.  For example, you could say:

    if Condition then
        ...
    end if;

or

    if Condition { ... };

or something like that.  The former would be used when "..." is long;
the latter when "..." is short (eg three lines or less?) -- so short
that the "}" is close to the "if", so it's obvious what it belongs to,
so "end if" is merely clutter in that case.

And probably the {...} syntax couldn't have other control structures
nested inside it -- it's only allowed for the innermost thing.

Good idea?

Oh, and I'd like my editor to automatically convert from one to the
other as "..." grows or shrinks.

> I'd really like to use the {} for something else, and there are only a few 
> symmetric bracket pairs to choose from. 

What did you have in mind?  Literals of type "set"?

Note that you can invent new bracket-y pairs using some slightly ugly
syntax like:

    (.   .)
    (:   :)
    (*   *) -- Pascal uses this one.
    <<   >> -- Ada uses this one.
    ``   '' -- The TeX "programming" language uses this. ;-)

BTW, I wish ASCII had left and right double-quote characters.  That
would be much more civilized.

- Bob