From: gwtmp01@...
Date: 2005-07-18T08:15:46+09:00
Subject: Re: `not' in parameter lists


On Jul 17, 2005, at 2:34 PM, Daniel Brockman wrote:
>
> The �core idea� in this case being... what?

negation of a truth value

I guess I missed the tongue-in-cheek nature of your
posting.

Regarding:

     assert foo.respond_to? bar

I think that having too much flexibility in a
grammar leads to confusion and different "dialects".
Ruby has a nice balance right now. IMHO.  That doesn't
mean that it can't be made better.

If I follow you correctly, you are suggesting that
not only should parenthesis be optional in method
calls but that the commas should be optional also and
while you are at it you want the not keyword to be parsed
syntactically as an operator/method even though it doesn't
behave as one.

My gut feeling is that these changes introduce too
much flexibility into the grammar such that it *could*
become difficult for programmer A to understand
programmer B's code.  Just my opinion of course.

I also have a feeling from a human-factors point of
view that punctuation is important to improving the
readability of code.  While I think a lisp-like
syntax is immensely powerful from a programatic standpoint
I think that it can be difficult for a human
to read and understand quickly.

>
>> Here is a function from the Version 7 Bourne Shell that was
>> notorious for its abuse of C macros:  [gibberish]
>>
>
> Your point being... that C should not have had macros?
> That the Version 7 Bourne Shell should not have abused them?
> Or is the analogy that this is all well and good,

My point was that C macros provide a huge amount of syntax
flexibility and that can be abused to the point where it is
hard to read the code.


Gary Wright