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The progress in programming language design is going to come from eliminating human unfriendly syntax. The closer you can get to something that let's someone e
by brazzy 16y ago
The progress in programming language design is going to come from eliminating human unfriendly syntax. The closer you can get to something that let's someone express their intentions without restrictions, the better. The computer is, uh, servant of a human.
And a servant isn't very useful if he can't understand its master. Ignoring machine-friendliness in language design just leads to worse and more buggy tools (including compilers).
whenever someone takes the line that says humans must-adopt-to-computers, it is a fail. And that fail is going to be swept away by the next technology which just works.
Except the "just works" is far more likely to be actually achieved if it's easy to make it work as well as easy to understand.
Besides, "human-friendly vs. computer-friendly" is a false dichtomy. There are certainly things that are good for one and bad for the other, but language features can also be good for both, or very good for one while incurring very small disadvantages to the other.
- singular 16y agoBut don't forget that we don't have to limit ourselves to LALR or LL(k). Approaches like GLR allow the user to be happy as well as the tool writers. And again, don't forget, the tool writers have a harder time if they have to mangle their grammar to fit LALR, then write a bunch of hacks around it to get stuff to work. Working around an algorithm which can't express usable languages properly is a bit silly I think. It's better to improve the algorithm in the first place and keep everybody happy!!
- beza1e1 16y agoI do not know a single editor which does syntax highlighting by actually parsing (including semantic analysis) the code. Most of them use regular expressions at most.