This post is about a programming language that I've never used, called Pliant. Sometimes knowing something about other languages can be useful for our language, so I think this is not a fully off topic post. Time ago I have found Python (that now I am using a lot) because I like to explore less known languages.
It's a bit like a Lisp without most of its parenthesis: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pliant http://fullpliant.org/ An example of Pliant code: http://fullpliant.org/pliant/util/encoding/zlib.pli As bitwise operators Pliant uses the following ones instead of the cryptic symbols (~ | & ^) used by C and Python: .not. .or. .and. .xor. For the same purpose maybe Python 3 can use: NOT OR AND XOR That are easy to remember. Pliant uses indentations almost as Python, this is an example (I have added the ! to keep the indentations): ! function factorial x -> f ! arg Int x f ! if x=0 ! f := 1 ! else ! f := x * (factorial x-1) But with a difference (this is from Pliant online documentation): >Tabs are not allowed in the source code: you have to use spaces instead. The >main reason for not allowing them is that not everybody agrees on the number >of spaces each tab stands for, so when a program contains several modules >provided by different people, the number could be different in various >modules. Tabs could be allowed if the number of spaces they stood for were >declared at the beginning of the module, but then the various editors would >have to be aware of that ... so it is simpler to use only spaces. Furthermore, >most editors provide a 'translate tabs to spaces' function.< Bye, bearophile -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
