3 ms·

> Have you tried Ada? I have tried Pascal in that sphere, which was on the too verbose side. Arrow notations like in JS/Typescript are fine to parse for me. S

by mihaic 3y ago

> Have you tried Ada? I have tried Pascal in that sphere, which was on the too verbose side. Arrow notations like in JS/Typescript are fine to parse for me. Some clear symbols are actually easier to read than an unpronounceable alphanumeric.

int_19h 3y ago
IMO the main thing that made Pascal verbose is begin...end for all compound statements. If you ditch that - as even Wirth himself did in the next iteration, Modula-2 - the rest is much more palatable. Consider: (* Pascal *) if a > b then begin blah; blah; end else begin blah; blah; end; -- Ada if a > b then blah; blah; else blah; blah; end if; // C if (a > b) { blah(); blah(); } else { blah(); blah(); } Pascal is clearly very verbose here, but the other two are pretty similar. That said I think that punctuation to delimit blocks makes more sense because it makes program structure clearly distinct. Although by the same token I think I'd prefer conditionals and loops to also be symbolic operators, so that there are no keywords inside executable code, only identifiers. Basically something like "?" instead of "if", "@" instead of "while" etc.
- zozbot234 3y ago
  {} are isomorphic to 'begin' and 'end' in that snippet, though. Part of the reason why early programming languages were comparatively heavy on keywords is that the symbol set was not standardized across machines, so you couldn't count on some symbols being available. It's why C still supports <% %> as digraphs for curly braces, or <: :> for square brackets. Also why languages such as COBOL go as far as supporting syntax like DIVIDE X INTO Y, because the machine character set might not have a slash or divide sign.
  - int_19h 3y ago
    They are, but it makes all the difference in practice. You can write "then begin" and "end else begin", but I haven't ever seen Pascal code written in that style, and I can understand why - it's just much less readable. OCaml is nice in that "begin" and "end" are aliases for "(" and ")", so you can use whichever one makes the most sense for readability. Anyway, the point is that the way to go is either 1) make structured programming constructs implicitly compound, so that you don't need braces for multi-statement bodies, or 2) make those braces as compact as possible so that being explicit is not so painful.

by mihaic 3y ago

int_19h 3y ago

IMO the main thing that made Pascal verbose is begin...end for all compound statements. If you ditch that - as even Wirth himself did in the next iteration, Modula-2 - the rest is much more palatable. Consider: (* Pascal *) if a > b then begin blah; blah; end else begin blah; blah; end; -- Ada if a > b then blah; blah; else blah; blah; end if; // C if (a > b) { blah(); blah(); } else { blah(); blah(); } Pascal is clearly very verbose here, but the other two are pretty similar. That said I think that punctuation to delimit blocks makes more sense because it makes program structure clearly distinct. Although by the same token I think I'd prefer conditionals and loops to also be symbolic operators, so that there are no keywords inside executable code, only identifiers. Basically something like "?" instead of "if", "@" instead of "while" etc.

zozbot234 3y ago
{} are isomorphic to 'begin' and 'end' in that snippet, though. Part of the reason why early programming languages were comparatively heavy on keywords is that the symbol set was not standardized across machines, so you couldn't count on some symbols being available. It's why C still supports <% %> as digraphs for curly braces, or <: :> for square brackets. Also why languages such as COBOL go as far as supporting syntax like DIVIDE X INTO Y, because the machine character set might not have a slash or divide sign.
- int_19h 3y ago
  They are, but it makes all the difference in practice. You can write "then begin" and "end else begin", but I haven't ever seen Pascal code written in that style, and I can understand why - it's just much less readable. OCaml is nice in that "begin" and "end" are aliases for "(" and ")", so you can use whichever one makes the most sense for readability. Anyway, the point is that the way to go is either 1) make structured programming constructs implicitly compound, so that you don't need braces for multi-statement bodies, or 2) make those braces as compact as possible so that being explicit is not so painful.