Re: Syntactic variability

Norm Tovey-Walsh writes:

> Hello,
>
> I’ve been toying with creating an issue for these ideas, but we need to
> be reducing the number of issues at this point, not increasing them, so
> I keep talking myself out of it.
>
> There is unnecessary syntactic variability in ixml that I don’t really
> understand. We allow either “:” or “=” as a rule separator and we allow
> either “;” or “|” as a alternative separator.

> ...

I cannot disagree with anything you say.

I kind of like the : and ; delimiters in part because they recall the
syntax used by van Wijngaarden in the concrete grammatical rules in
Algol 68. But in fact I like the idea of them more than I like actually
using them in practice: I find = more attractive semantically as well as
easier to spot visually and when a rule requires more than one line I
like to begin the second and later lines with the or-operator, and |
works better for that than ; if only because a line beginning with ;
looks like a comment to my internalized Lisp reader.

Michael


-- 
C. M. Sperberg-McQueen
Black Mesa Technologies LLC
http://blackmesatech.com

Received on Wednesday, 20 April 2022 08:23:51 UTC