Re: Quoted atoms are no longer operators

On Wed, Nov 27, 2013 at 4:26 PM, Jan Wielemaker <[email protected]> wrote:

> On 11/27/2013 03:34 PM, Kilian Evang wrote:
>
>> Hi,
>>
>> On 22-11-13 16:36, Jan Wielemaker wrote:
>>
>>>    - Quoted atoms are no longer operators.
>>>
>>
>> also about this change, I'd like to know: is there a (very) good reason?
>> If not, I'd like to add my voice to what Richard said [1]: this is a bad
>> idea, making e.g. operators with spaces in them impossible.
>>
>
> True. I've never seen them in the wild though. Putting white space
> inside identifiers is a pretty bad idea anyway because many reformatting
> tools (or editor commands) can silently change this, breaking your code
> and anyway, the difference between 'a<space>b' and 'a<tab>b' may be
> invisible and the difference between 'a b' and 'a  b' is poorly visible,
> in particular when using variable pitch fonts.
>

I think that it is not a good idea to use any editor that is not aware of
the language syntax (at least the tokenizer). The odds of 'a<space>b' being
transformed into a different token are similar to "a<space>b" being
transformed into a different string, isn't it?

On the other hand, variable pitch fonts in (some) code may be really
confusing (at least your editor should mark spaces in single/double quoted
tokens with a special glyph).

Richard's A '\uXXXX' B argument makes a little more sense. On the other
> hand, if you want it this ugly, '\uXXXX'(A,B) is just as good (or should
> I say ugly).
>
> This is a quite isolated issue.  A quite large majority I spoke to think
> it is a good idea.  If there are serious precedents of code basis that
> break, we can consider a flag.  In general, I don't like flags though.
>
>         Cheers --- Jan
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-- 
Jose
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