Newsgroups: comp.lang.prolog
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From: fjh@munta.cs.mu.OZ.AU (Fergus Henderson)
Subject: Re: Prolog syntax
Message-ID: <9511515.14215@mulga.cs.mu.OZ.AU>
Sender: news@cs.mu.OZ.AU (CS-Usenet)
Organization: Computer Science, University of Melbourne, Australia
References: <9511221.23905@mulga.cs.mu.OZ.AU> <PEREIRA.95Apr22162433@alta.research.att.com>
Date: Tue, 25 Apr 1995 05:43:21 GMT
Lines: 28

pereira@alta.research.att.com (Fernando Pereira) writes:

>The Edinburgh Prolog term readers and others derived from them always
>had the behavior you deplore. [...]
>I don't have the draft standard handy, but the behavior you deplore
>doesn't seerm to have caused serious problems before, and it's in fact
>quite convenient in many contexts.

Personally, I consider the fact that 

	X = ';'

is a syntax error to be a serious problem.
I don't see any convenience at all in allowing quoted operators
to retain their operator status.

>quoting an atom does not change its operator properties (it's a lexical,
>not a syntactic manipulation).

I'm not sure if this is just a description, an explanation, or an excuse ;-)
If it's an excuse, it's not a good one - lexical manipulations can certainly
have syntactic effects, and in this case I think it should.
Changing the grammar to accomodate this would be trivial.

-- 
Fergus Henderson            | Tell you what: go write a 100x100 matrix multiply
fjh@cs.mu.oz.au             | of integers in both languages and then let's talk
http://www.cs.mu.oz.au/~fjh | about speed, ok? - Tom Christiansen.
