🚀 go-pugleaf

aipdc@castle.ed.ac.uk (Paul Crowley) writes:

>I am both attracted to and repelled from the off-side rule - it provides
>potential both for more readable code and for horrendously intractable
>bugs.

>My question is: why not write the _language_ so that white space is not
>significant (except as a separator) but write a _filter_ which turns
>"off-side" code into "non-off-side" code.  That way, people who don't
>like the rule never have to think about it - foreign code can be pushed
>through the filter and then edited.

>A filter the other way might be nice but wouldn't be essential.

>...

>\/ o\ Paul Crowley aipdc@uk.ac.ed.castle
>/\__/ Trust me, I know what I'm doing.


Yes I agree with this _filter_ idea. My honours project in 1989 was
looking at initial Haskell specifications and included implementing
the formatting rules in a pre-processor / filter which inserted
brackets { } and semi-colons where appropriate. The modified source
was then given to the compiler.

In fact, the specification of the layout rule in the Haskell report is
actually specified as a translation on source code.

Having the pre-processor as a seperate entity allows any source code
to be processed before distribution to remove any possibility of
ambiguity.

-- 
Patrick Sansom                      | E-Mail:    sansom@cs.glasgow.ac.uk
Computing Science Research Student  | 
University of Glasgow               |