character syntax

[brian boutel]

I would prefer that a language syntax is designed to be good for users, 
even if that means it presents problems for implementors.

You have not argued that these issues indicate bad design from the point 
of view of an application programmer.

If you think about languages that have been designed to be easy to 
parse, are these really languages that you would want to use?

Ian Zimmerman wrote:

> itz> All this taken together, I mean, _really_, is the lexical
> itz> structure of Haskell a botch, or what?
> 
> Jon> No. Innovative. All the problems described in this thread reflect
> Jon> unwarranted assumptions inherited in emacs. It's plainly possible
> Jon> to parse Haskell, and not hard either.
> 
> First, parsing of a complete program (eg. by a compiler) is quite
> different from parsing a buffer that is being edited by a human.  The
> latter is hard, even for fairly well-specified languages.
> Irregularities only make it harder.
> 
> Second, this argument would be easier to accept if there in fact were
> an equally innovative tool capable of providing all the editing
> goodies Emacs normally does, for Haskell.  But I don't know of one,
> even now, 10 years or so after Haskell's birth.
> 
> 

--brian