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000078_icon-group-sender _Mon May 10 16:03:02 1993.msg
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Received: by cheltenham.cs.arizona.edu; Tue, 11 May 1993 10:22:43 MST
Date: 10 May 93 16:03:02 GMT
From: dog.ee.lbl.gov!network.ucsd.edu!news.cerf.net!netlabs!lwall@ucbvax.Berkeley.EDU (Larry Wall)
Organization: NetLabs, Inc.
Subject: Re: runtime debugger and the Icon fan club.
Message-Id: <1993May10.160302.6574@netlabs.com>
References: <1993Apr29.141749.24949@midway.uchicago.edu>, <1993May7.182643.26824@netlabs.com>, <1993May7.205551.1831@midway.uchicago.edu>
Sender: icon-group-request@cs.arizona.edu
To: icon-group@cs.arizona.edu
Status: R
Errors-To: icon-group-errors@cs.arizona.edu
In article <1993May7.205551.1831@midway.uchicago.edu> goer@midway.uchicago.edu writes:
: lwall@netlabs.com (Larry Wall) writes:
: >
: >: [Icon programmers] mainly use the semicolon to separate two expres-
: >: sions abutted on the same line. Generally it is lacking from idiomatic
: >: Icon code, and with good reason: It is generally superfluous even in
: >: languages that force one to use it!
: >
: >Not to contradict a valid assertion, but as a point of interest it's
: >not superfluous in Perl, since it switches the lexer from expecting an
: >operator to expecting a term, just as any other operator would.
:
: So, for example, if we see INTEGER 1, then OP '*', then INTEGER 1, if
: we then see a ';' the lexer knows that the next thing is not going to be an
: operator? Maybe I'm not understanding, but wouldn't a newline accom-
: plish the same thing?
:
: 1 * 1;
: 2 * 2...
:
: vs.
:
: 1 * 1
: 2 * 2...
Certainly, if you're willing to place that kind of syntactic load on a
newline. I don't happen to be, probably for irrational reasons--I once
got a bad taste in my mouth from the way awk does it. I much prefer
that a newline character be treated (by default) as nothing more than a
funny-looking space character, in the tradition of so-called "free-form"
languages. Only in the explicitly line-oriented constructs of Perl
(here-docs and formats) are newlines syntactically different from spaces.
Hmm, looking back at that last paragraph I wrote, I only see one period
at the end of a line, and that one, being at the end of a paragraph, is
superfluous... :-)
Larry