Re: A newbie question
dan bornside <[email protected]>
| Newsgroups | gmane.comp.breve |
|---|---|
| Message-ID | <[email protected]> |
a period is no more or less compact, nor clear than a semicolon. there are numerous reasons why they should not be synonyms. steve is not C. It is reasonable to think that Steve might be someone's first language. It is constructed in a very simple manner, and would be ideally suited as a first language. Explaining a period as the end of a statement may just be a little easier for that task. Steve is also an expression oriented language, like C, Ada, Lisp, perl, and so on. for Command oriented languages such as Basic, AppleScript, TCL, Fortran and the like, newlines as separators makes sense, because there must be lots of commands for the program to do anything, and its unlikely that a command can grow to a great length. In expression oriented languages, statements are just a kind of expression, and may reasonably occur very small and close together, like in a tightly wound loop, or may grow to great length, with long expressions making them up. Readability would require that newlines occur every 80 columns, which would correspond to the end of a command in a command language, but usually doesn't correspond to the end of a statement in an expression language. There are only a limited number of punctuators in the ASCII set, and about half of them already have explicit meanings. It's a waste to make a synonym out of two of those few characters. It would be even worse to just change the usage from one character to another late in the development cycle, since that would break all previously written code. Adding a compiler pragma to make it a settable option at the source level would probably do more to harm the readability of the code than to strengthen it. In summary, the period stays, the semicolon shall be used for some other task which we have not yet defined. db On Monday, Jun 7, 2004, at 15:39 America/Chicago, Zav - Alex Zavatone wrote: > > On Jun 7, 2004, at 1:10 PM, Juha Vehviläinen wrote: > >> Ha! For a moment there you got me... > > I'm actually quite serious. > > I know. It sure sounds strange. But I'll take visual clarity of code > and verbosity any day over compact, obscure syntax. > > In 6 months when I look back at some complex object, it is that much > easier and quicker to understand. > > - Zav > I love the camera and the camera loves me. > http://pets.reptilian-feline.net/images/zav.jpg > > > _______________________________________________ > breve mailing list > [email protected] > http://www.spiderland.org/mailman/listinfo/breve > _______________________________________________ breve mailing list [email protected] http://www.spiderland.org/mailman/listinfo/breve