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I don't follow. Can you elaborate? What is 2-D syntax?
by dmos62 5y ago
I don't follow. Can you elaborate? What is 2-D syntax?
- breck 5y ago1D syntax assumes a linear pass from beginning to end across the bytes of a program to build the AST. You have concepts like brackets and parens and quotation marks and colons. 2D languages have none of those. They imagine all programs as laid out on a grid. Think of a spreadsheet. For trees, you use indentation. There is not a single computer language in all the world that cannot have it's semantics represented with just that 2D syntax. This realization has long fascinated me. It knocks me off my feet, the same way I feel about binary notation. Here is a talk I gave in 2017 about 1D vs higher D languages: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ldVtDlbOUMA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ldVtDlbOUMA Here is a video that makes the connection between programming languages and spreadsheets clearer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0l2QWH-iV3k https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0l2QWH-iV3k
- neolog 5y agoAre you related to https://www.tree-annotation.org/ https://www.tree-annotation.org/ ?
- breck 5y agoNo, but this is really interesting! Thank you so much for sharing! I obviously have quite a passion for the idea that there's a universality to Tree Structures and some fundamental simple notation we are stumbling towards, so interesting to see others with that! This page (https://www.tree-annotation.org/blog/no-escape.html https://www.tree-annotation.org/blog/no-escape.html) is close to one of the benefits, but it turns out you don't need any escape characters at all! Simply indentation let's you have blocks that cut and paste naturally with no escaping.