Beni Cherniavsky-Paskin: > Consider now a notation opposite to Z where things are *never* implicitly > grouped into lists. I'm not proposing this is usable, only as food for > thought.
Very different approach, thanks for posting. I think your list of the *problems* of the bullet approach puts the nail in that coffin quite convincingly. For example, in a world with proportional fonts, it doesn't make sense to create a notation that's impractical to use with them. Also, A-expressions don't look all that usable at this early stage of maturity, and more importantly, it's not clear to me that people would easily grok their meaning (are they "readable"?). Granted, people can learn anything if they must, but I'd like for the resulting code to have an "obvious meaning" if well-formatted. But that doesn't mean that the notation can't be improved, or that we can't learn from them. It'd be nice to see some examples of longer/useful functions written in this different notation, or whatever notation you come up with. I created a long list of functions, from many different Lisp notations, when creating sweet-expressions to make sure that it would have good results in typical use. Also, please make them easy to read on a mail reader that strips initial whitespace. To be honest, I'm really *happy* and *excited* about sweet-expressions as currently defined in the latest BNF. But if there's a better alternative, now would be the time to raise it. --- David A. Wheeler ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Master Visual Studio, SharePoint, SQL, ASP.NET, C# 2012, HTML5, CSS, MVC, Windows 8 Apps, JavaScript and much more. Keep your skills current with LearnDevNow - 3,200 step-by-step video tutorials by Microsoft MVPs and experts. ON SALE this month only -- learn more at: http://p.sf.net/sfu/learnnow-d2d _______________________________________________ Readable-discuss mailing list Readable-discuss@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/readable-discuss
