Re: simple vs complex languages

Steve_Lipscombe@amat.com wrote:
>
> Robert wrote
>
> >The thing that bothers me about all this fancy parsing technology we
> >have developed over the past few decades is that it is solving an
> >artificial problem. If we didn't design our programming languages to
> >have such doggone complicated syntax, then we would be happy to use
> >hand-written recursive-descent parsers.
> >...
>
> And our moderator replied
>
> >[I don't see why it's artificial. Human languages have very complex
> >grammars. That's how we're wired to work. Why shouldn't computers
> >adapt to us for a change? -John]
>
> I'm with Robert on this one.


Me, too. I understand the notion that I'd rather have the machine do
the work than me. The logical extension of making the program easy
for the machine would be to write it in absolute binary. Then all the
machine has to do is turn 1's and 0's into bytes.


Even so, it strikes me that, given a certain construct (variable
declarations, for example), why would you choose a syntax that's hard
to parse, over one that's easy? Unless there's a compelling advantage
to the programmer for the hard-to-parse construct, I'd go for the one
that's easy. My experience has been that one can usually think of a
construct that's both comfortable for the user _AND_ easy to parse.


> Why make anything needlessly complicated? Just to prove how clever we are?


I think so. So much research has gone into compiler theory and
parsing techniques, to make the parsers able to handle just about
_ANY_ construct, I get the impression that folks want to be sure they
get their money's worth by using it. I'd much prefer the KISS
approach.


Jack

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