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000214_icon-group-sender _Thu Aug 18 18:43:10 1994.msg
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Received: by cheltenham.cs.arizona.edu; Thu, 18 Aug 1994 15:44:24 MST
To: icon-group-l@cs.arizona.edu
Date: 18 Aug 1994 18:43:10 GMT
From: mslamm@pluto.mscc.huji.ac.il (Zvi Lamm)
Message-Id: <330a3u$3vq@shum.cc.huji.ac.il>
Organization: The Hebrew Univ. of Jerusalem, Computation Center.
Sender: icon-group-request@cs.arizona.edu
Subject: Simple syntax? A definition?
Status: R
Errors-To: icon-group-errors@cs.arizona.edu
Following the recent thread on perl vs. Icon, and posts about UNIX
*tools* I started thinking on how one can define what are the good
qualities a synatx should have.
It appears to me that what counts is simplicity. A simple syntax would be
one that can easaly be built (NOT parsed) by programs (so that the
language can be used as a tool interface). It would also be easy for
humans (that's us!) to learn and use.
Does anyone have suggestions on how to define this in a more mathematical
or precise way? I thought about YACC clauses/sentence. But I am not sure
it's enough because the YACC approach narrows you down to LALR.
I thought one criterion can be PROXIMITY - that is that semantically
related elements should be near each other. Any others?
Ehud Lamm == mslamm@pluto.mscc.huji.ac.il "My home is not a page!"