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From: mhamburg@mv.us.adobe.com (Mark Hamburg)
Subject: Re: Flexible variable names
Message-ID: <mhamburg-131194225356@macb022.mv.us.adobe.com>
Followup-To: comp.lang.dylan
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References: <will-0911941658570001@willsmac.cs.su.oz.au> <LGM.94Nov13204304@polaris.ih.att.com>
Date: Mon, 14 Nov 1994 06:53:56 GMT
Lines: 43

In article <LGM.94Nov13204304@polaris.ih.att.com>, lgm@polaris.ih.att.com
(Lawrence G. Mayka) wrote:

> 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.

So are you for it or against it?

Mark
