4 ms·
Nice ideas but for the love of god what is up with the syntax resulting in lines with nothing but an indented semi-colon? Pleeeease reconsider this. You may no
by ztjio 9y ago
Nice ideas but for the love of god what is up with the syntax resulting in lines with nothing but an indented semi-colon?
Pleeeease reconsider this. You may not think it matters but people make terrible language choices every day on such basis.
- cdancette 9y agoAgreed, braces seem a better fit here
- chubot 9y agoI initially downvoted you for the rude tone, but when I look at the code, I do see the same thing. https://github.com/cell-lang/compiler/blob/master/src/main.cell https://github.com/cell-lang/compiler/blob/master/src/main.c... There is a opening colon on if/for/while, and a closing semi-colon. This seems the same ergonomically as an open brace and a close brace, and needlessly different. I can understand leaving off the closing delimiter for a Python-like syntax. But this doesn't seem to be a good compromise. The language sounds awesome in many other respects, which I have yet to dive into. But yes unfortunately this is the first thing people see. My philosophy is to have new syntax where there are new semantics, but old syntax for old semantics. And blocks seems like they have no new semantics, so it should just choose C/Java style or Python style. It reminds me of when Rust was first released, and they used brk for break and cnt for continue. That was just silly, because they mean exactly the same things as they do in every other common language, with a needless syntactic difference. People program in more than one language simultaneously, and all these differences add up.
- nine_k 9y ago> just choose C/Java style or Python style. +1 for this. I must add that Haskell somehow manages to combine both, so you can use braces if needed, but normally people use indents, and neither leads to syntactic uncertainties.
- _sdegutis 9y agoHonestly that kind of extra feature was a bit of a hindrance when learning Haskell. Always felt like I was learning the wrong style no matter which style I went with.
- maxxxxx 9y agoAgreed. For people from a C, C++ or Java background ";" on it means an empty statement. Braces are much more common for this. Or do something like "endif" or "endfor" or just "end"
- nickelbox 9y ago+1. But at least it's better than Zimbu where there's a closing brace but no opening one. That's my personal bar for bad language design decisions.