Sven Barth wrote:
Languages evolve. Natural languages as well as programming languages. We
might not agree with every change (e.g. in German there has been
established the nasty habit of saying "that makes sense" ("das macht
Sinn") while the correct equivalent would be "that has sense" ("das hat
Sinn") or "that is sensful" ("das ist sinnvoll")), but we can not stop
this evolution. Languages that don't evolve are dead, because noone
speaks them anymore (as everyone will always add his one character to
the language, though granted this is not as easy for programming
languages as you need to work in the compiler/interpreter). Hadn't
Borland decided to bring out Delphi and thus the completely different
object model (which I personally think is in most points superior to TP
style objects, to those have their pros, too), but instead kept e.g.
Turbo Pascal for Windows we might not be talking together here today.
I'm not sure that I should venture an opinion, since my ability to
implement something- to "practice what I preach"- is limited due to my
position on the learning curve.
However, I'd suggest that there are two possible category of extension:
those that implement a clearly-delimited first-class object with
interesting properties, and those that don't.
Something like a <generic>, or a /regular expression/ (borrowing from
Perl), or a [list of elements] fall into the first category, and should
be comparatively easy to add to a language- and for a user to ignore if
he doesn't like them.
Something like
>>>> for a in a index i do
falls squarely into the latter category: it's messy to parse, worse to
read, and is completely unlike any existing language idioms.
--
Mark Morgan Lloyd
markMLl .AT. telemetry.co .DOT. uk
[Opinions above are the author's, not those of his employers or colleagues]
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