Re: Is this a new idea?

firth@sei.cmu.edu (Robert Firth)
Tue, 17 Nov 1992 12:54:59 GMT

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Re: Is this a new idea? dlarsson%abbaut@Sweden.EU.net (1992-11-11)
Re: Is this a new idea? macrakis@osf.org (1992-11-11)
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Newsgroups: comp.compilers
From: firth@sei.cmu.edu (Robert Firth)
Organization: Software Engineering Institute
Date: Tue, 17 Nov 1992 12:54:59 GMT
References: 92-10-113 92-11-088
Keywords: C, design

drw@euclid.mit.edu (Dale R. Worley) writes:
>Any language has this problem if it has tokens whose syntactic
>category can't be determined solely by the form of the token.


True. The answer, I suppose, is not to design such languages.


>Almost any language with an extensible set of operators is going to
>run into this problem.


Why? We have languages with extensible sets of identifiers, and none of
the well-designed ones runs into this problem. It is simply a matter of
specifying the lexis of operators so that they can be distinguished. As
an obvious cheap and ugly way, require all user-defined operators to be
delimited by $...$, or some other character not used elsewhere.


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