Re: language design tradeoffs

weberwu@inf.fu-berlin.de (Debora
Weber-Wulff) writes:
>raveling@Unify.com (Paul Raveling) writes:
>[sick macro trap in C deleted]
>Sigh. The problem is not the ';', it's the syntax of the if statement. If
>';' were nothing more than a statement separator and the empty statement
>were allowed, we could write ';;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;' if we felt like it. Then
>'if' must be terminated with a nice 'fi'and the problem goes away. Another
>reason why explicit terminators like od and fi are a good idea!


True. It is, however, possible to achieve the same effect in languages
that don't require if/do terminators by religously making the statement
inside the if/do a block; i.e. always use {} or BEGIN/END or whatever it's
called in the language of the week.


In fact, I would argue that a language that requires coding that way has
superior syntax to a do/od language, because of the well-known problem
with the spelling of the terminators. Things like TNEMMOC, CNUF and NIGEB
start looking OD rather quickly.


SR
---
[Algol68 came close to TNEMMOC, but also did an amazing job of letting you
use parentheses, vertical bars, and the like, as synonyms for if, else, fi,
begin, end, and other common delimiters. -John]
--

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