Re: newbie impression of Dylan syntax
Dustin Voss <[email protected]>
| Newsgroups | gmane.comp.lang.dylan.gwydion.devel |
|---|---|
| Message-ID | <[email protected]> |
Semicolons are necessary to separate statements, but the parser can determine the extent of a “<something>…end <something>” block without semicolons. Dylan’s syntax is too extensible to avoid the need for semicolons. Plus, the recursivity of the syntax means the developer will often need to break statements across different lines to make them readable, or combine things on a single line to make them more compact. For example, method (x) => (y) format-out(“Yo, I’m squaring %d into a vector\n”, x); vector(x * x) end (15).size is, I think, a legal replacement for code like square-into-vector(15).size On Feb 27, 2013, at 4:08 PM, Alexey Muranov <[email protected]> wrote: > Hello, > > i have already posted to this list asking about Snow Leopard support, sorry for not staying in touch, i am afraid i may not have enough time to dedicate (programming is only my hobby, and i already work on a small Ruby web application). > > I just wanted to share my first impression of Dylan, for whatever it is worth. I liked Ruby, but i am getting tired with its small inconsistencies. It looked to me like Lisps are really beautiful languages, but i am not a fan of parentheses (if only they used curly braces! :)). > > Dylan syntax looks readable to me, but i am wondering about one thing: are all the semicolons at the end of each line necessary for parsing? My first impression would be "no", but maybe i am missing something. If only it was possible to make semicolons at the end of line optional, i think it would have significantly increased the visual appeal of Dylan and saved some typing. > > In my opinion, if accidentally concatenating two lines can break the code at compile time but cannot change the meaning of the code, the language can still be considered white-space insensitive in a weaker sense. > > Best regards, > > Alexey. > _______________________________________________ > hackers mailing list > [email protected] > https://lists.opendylan.org/mailman/listinfo/hackers _______________________________________________ hackers mailing list [email protected] https://lists.opendylan.org/mailman/listinfo/hackers