On Tuesday 11 January 2005 11.43, Steve Harris wrote:
[...]
> I understand the motivation for the language, but I do wish you had
> used an existing syntax, eg. supercollider is based on smalltalk.
> Having to remember Yet Another Function Declaration Syntax is not
> on the list of things I want to do.
Well, I'm open to suggestions. :-) EEL is an experimental language at
this point, and I intend to fix annoying syntax issues before there
are significant amounts of EEL code to break.
Anyway, I've tried to stick with well known conventions from popular
languages, but I guess it doesn't matter what language EEL resembles
or implements; some people will hate it anyway! :-D
My main focus has been on easy typing and reading, and making it hard
to accidentally write code that doesn't do what you think it does. I
especially dislike ridiculously long lines, so I've tried to avoid
having countless qualifier keywords in declarations. That's one of
the reasons for the "funny" function declaration syntax.
I've tried to think things through, but I don't have all the time in
the world for design at this point, nor do I have the massive
experience with countless different languages that would have been
handy now.
> I regualrly have to work in C, PHP, Perl, JavaScript and sometimes
> Java (often in the same project), and I'm sick of arbitrary syntax
> choices.
Well, it's kind of hard to have the same syntax in all languages,
without actually making them the same language, isn't it? :-)
That said, I guess every languages contains a number of syntax
peculiarities that are mostly there because of old habit. If you
can't find a strong reason to do something in a particular way, you
tend to fall back to something that feels familiar and/or good in a
subjective way. I guess I have a few of those in EEL as well.
The BASIC style call syntax, for example;
f "some", "arguments";
I think I'll switch to good old C style, for several reasons. It's a
trivial change, and I've already seen enough examples of why the
current syntax is a bad idea.
//David Olofson - Programmer, Composer, Open Source Advocate
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Received on Tue Jan 11 20:15:08 2005
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