concrete syntax (was: "off-side rule")

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#760

From: Anurag Acharya
Date: Tue, 22 Jan 1991 22:25

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It seems that in focussing on abstract syntax, folks designing lazy functional
programming languages like Miranda and Haskell have pretty much ignored 
concrete syntax. I have heard the comment - "who cares about concrete syntax ?
parsing is a problem of the 60s and 70s." Personally, I think that this is
a rather callous approach since it pays little or no attention to the 
usability of the language. Attitudes like this result in anachronisms like
the "off-side rule"  and white-space significance hanging around long
after the rest of the world has gone on.

Great deal of attention has been paid to ensuring that the semantics of these 
languages is rigorously specified and "clean". I would expect that a fraction
of this rigor and cleanliness would carry over to the specification of syntax.
....


anurag

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From: acha@CS.CMU.EDU (Anurag Acharya)
Newsgroups: comp.lang.functional
Subject: concrete syntax (was: "off-side rule")
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Date: 22 Jan 91 22:25:28 GMT
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