From: Peter Hickman <peter@...>
Date: 2002-09-10T22:59:11+09:00
Subject: Re: Ruby aesthetics

William Djaja Tjokroaminata wrote:

>Suppose we are to design a new language; then one of
>the questions to be answered will be, is it advantageous to be minimalist
>in keywords?  Do we really want both "if" and "unless"?)
>
In C the first thing I ever did when writting a program was write

#define FALSE(x) (x == 0)
#define TRUE(x) !FALSE(x)

And it wasn't just me, many C coders I knew had a whole load of macros 
that they couldn't program without (min, max etc). The macros made up 
for the deficiency in C.

If in your minimal language you do not have 'unless' but do allow macros 
or somesuch and programmers keep writting their own 'unless' macro then 
we could argue that your language is lacking 'unless'.

A language can get by without any syntactic sugar. Can the programmers?