4 ms·

I disagree. The syntax design should flow from the design of the language itself and whether or not you use prefix or postfix notation for type annotations depe

• throwanem 6y ago
  Granted that the pathological case of the error you warn against is Perl, and that should be enough of a cautionary tale for anyone. But a language is a user interface for programmers, too. Some affordance is merited, especially in a case like this where prefix vs. postfix may affect ease of parsing, but seems most unlikely to influence how the type system actually behaves.
  • qppo 6y ago
    You're right, I just don't care for the author's notes on language design because they're all on syntax design, which is an impossible task to do in morsels without knowing anything about the rest of the language or how it is supposed to work. I do prefer postfix because I think it flows very nicely "this is-a thing assigned-to that" is nicer than "thing called this assigned-to that." In terms of the impact on the language, optional postfix annotation makes it a bit trickier if you want to make the identifier optional, and in languages that support it you tend to see special syntax to deal with that case (which breaks the author's fetish for self consistency). Personally I think ordering of the trio of "alias" "thing" "value" should be consistent across the language, which extends far past variable assignment, and any one of the trio can be left out.
    • disconcision 6y ago
      What are examples of language semantics which are better served by pre/postfix type annotations? Also, what exactly do you mean by making the identifier optional?