Newsgroups: comp.lang.dylan
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From: lgm@polaris.ih.att.com (Lawrence G. Mayka)
Subject: Re: Flexible variable names
In-Reply-To: will@cs.su.oz.au's message of Wed, 09 Nov 1994 16:58:57 +1100
Message-ID: <LGM.94Nov13204304@polaris.ih.att.com>
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References: <will-0911941658570001@willsmac.cs.su.oz.au>
Date: Mon, 14 Nov 1994 02:43:04 GMT
Lines: 36

In article <will-0911941658570001@willsmac.cs.su.oz.au> will@cs.su.oz.au (William Uther) writes:

     I'm only just starting to write Dylan code.  Do people find the fact
   that spaces are so significant annoying?  It can lead to strange code such
   as:

   ? begin
   >  let a = 10;
   >  let b = 20;
   >  let a+b = 2;
   >  a+b + a + b;
   > end;
   32

   Which is not entirely obvious, especially for someone used to C or Pascal.

     Is this just a MacMarlais thing?  Do people find it a problem - is the
   ability to have +, - etc in variable names worth the potential for bugs?

When I worked in a large C development project, it was considered bad
style not to surround all operators (except function call and array
reference) by whitespaace.  Whitespace increases readability.  Also,
it was considered bad style to rely on C's byzantine operator
precedence except in the most obvious, simple cases.  Why cause
difficult-to-spot bugs simply to save a couple of keystrokes?

I have often thought that the effort wasted in devising, then writing
parsers for, baroque syntaxes that are bad style anyway could have
been better spent elsewhere.

--
        Lawrence G. Mayka
        AT&T Bell Laboratories
        lgm@ieain.att.com

Standard disclaimer.
