Dan Sugalski writes:
: If we're going to provide a mechanism to define the syntax of
: a mini-language (or a maxi one, I suppose, though there are probably better
: ways to do it) then the details of colons and constants and what-have-yous
: are pretty close to irrelevant.
I expect that most of these lingos will want to redefine the small
stuff rather than the big stuff. So if you're a numerologist you might
want to redefine how subscripts are parsed or some such without
changing anything outside of subscripts.
: If we can redefine the entire world then, well, we can redefine the world.
: It doesn't really much matter the shape of Africa if we're building Europa.
Well, sure, but if you're only interested in Africa you shouldn't have
to respecify Europa. We already have a sledgehammer with source
filtering, and that has demonstrable problems--ask any Damian. That's
why I said that such things need to be scope limited. I expect most of
the sublingoes to be barely distinguishable from Standard Perl except
for some narrow slice of oddity. It's really just applying to syntax
munging the same principle we apply to variables. We declare our variables
in the smallest possible scope if we want to avoid unforeseen interactions
with other code elsewhere. Similarly, syntactic munging should only
tweak that smallest part of the grammar that it can get away with to
accomplish what it needs to.
Larry
