4 ms·

The issue I see is that a . and a , are tiny little marks on the screen that are super easy to miss and, at a glance, the . , ; all can look the same. Maybe wit

The issue I see is that a . and a , are tiny little marks on the screen that are super easy to miss and, at a glance, the . , ; all can look the same. Maybe with practice you can spot the differences easier, but certainly as a newcomer to the language its a lot of extra cognitive load. && and || at least are super obvious.

Skinney 7y ago
I don't write Picat, but when I write Prolog the color scheme for Emacs gives those operators a bright color so they stand out.
- dkersten 7y ago
  Right. As someone who uses raindbow parentheses, I should have immediately thought that it would be solved by the editor. Still, I don't like if readability relies on the editor too much, since you often want to paste or read code elsewhere (on HN, stackoverflow, github, random websites, etc) that may not know about your non-mainstream language.
  - masukomi 7y ago
    if making your editor compensate for the language syntax is the only way to make the language syntax easily readable then the language designer has failed.
    - YeGoblynQueenne 7y ago
      The comma and dot are natural ways to separate and end statements in natural language. Why are they a problem in a programming language, where you have to be extremely careful about your syntax anyway?
      - dkersten 7y ago
        I think there's two reasons: First, its a trend. Other languages have trained us to not see them so much (as pard68 said), to put much more weight on other things. Its not complete though, many programming languages do use them: to separate elements in a list, to separate parameters, as method.calls, and in numbers 1.0, so that's probably a very minor reason over all. Second, programming languages are very symbol heavy: we use all kinds of operators and special->symbols and (various [brackets]), it just kinda drowns out small symbols that are at the bottom of the line like a , or . and they're just not as obvious as keywords or ink-heavy symbols. But overall, I guess I'm just not used to seeing them in that context and I'd get over it really quickly, just like I very quickly got over Python's significant whitespace or Lisps parentheses. It seems like a big deal until one day suddenly its not anymore.
- YeGoblynQueenne 7y ago
  And the compiler gives a bright (red) color to their absence, also. You do need the Swi-Prolog IDE for that though.
pard68 7y ago
Especially when you are used to more or less filtering out '.', ',', and ';'.

Skinney 7y ago

I don't write Picat, but when I write Prolog the color scheme for Emacs gives those operators a bright color so they stand out.

dkersten 7y ago
Right. As someone who uses raindbow parentheses, I should have immediately thought that it would be solved by the editor. Still, I don't like if readability relies on the editor too much, since you often want to paste or read code elsewhere (on HN, stackoverflow, github, random websites, etc) that may not know about your non-mainstream language.
- masukomi 7y ago
  if making your editor compensate for the language syntax is the only way to make the language syntax easily readable then the language designer has failed.
  - YeGoblynQueenne 7y ago
    The comma and dot are natural ways to separate and end statements in natural language. Why are they a problem in a programming language, where you have to be extremely careful about your syntax anyway?
    - dkersten 7y ago
      I think there's two reasons: First, its a trend. Other languages have trained us to not see them so much (as pard68 said), to put much more weight on other things. Its not complete though, many programming languages do use them: to separate elements in a list, to separate parameters, as method.calls, and in numbers 1.0, so that's probably a very minor reason over all. Second, programming languages are very symbol heavy: we use all kinds of operators and special->symbols and (various [brackets]), it just kinda drowns out small symbols that are at the bottom of the line like a , or . and they're just not as obvious as keywords or ink-heavy symbols. But overall, I guess I'm just not used to seeing them in that context and I'd get over it really quickly, just like I very quickly got over Python's significant whitespace or Lisps parentheses. It seems like a big deal until one day suddenly its not anymore.
YeGoblynQueenne 7y ago
And the compiler gives a bright (red) color to their absence, also. You do need the Swi-Prolog IDE for that though.

pard68 7y ago

Especially when you are used to more or less filtering out '.', ',', and ';'.