🚀 go-pugleaf

Stephen P Spackman:
>  How about having NO reserved words?

Easy to implement, though I'm not sure what the benefit is.  If you
want to go even further "out there" you might consider methods to
dynamically alter the parser's word-formation rules -- but again, I
don't see the benefit.  Certainly, it would be strange to find that

  IF (X = 1) THEN PRINT Y;

meant 'compute the set intersection of the sets named ) and THEN, and
store the result under the name ;'.

And it would be even stranger to find that the whole line was a single
identifier.

Stephen P Spackman:
>  |   Part of the reason, of course, is that there isn't enough of a
>  |   type system to resolve overloads.

Me:
>  |I'm not quite sure what this means.

Stephen P Spackman:
>  Just that since there are no static types, and very, very few
>  dynamic ones, it's hard to reuse a symbol: * couldn't be used for
>  set intersection because you can't tell if a vector is intended to
>  be interpreted as a set or not - that isn't recorded anywhere. So
>  operators are in VERY short supply. Which is why there need to be
>  so many squiggles, and why Iverson needs them all for himself :-).

Operators are not in short supply -- or maybe you're using a different
definition of "operator" than Jim Giles?  I could easily define an
operator named FIND_SET_INTERSECTION, for example.

>  |   But it seems really silly to say "these are my letters and
>  |   those are yours" and make it impossible to build
>  |   application-specific notation within the language.
>  |
>  |I haven't a clue what this means.

>  I mean that it is none of the application programmer's business
>  which functions are "built in" to the language, and which comes
>  from a library that the system architect has provided. So there
>  shouldn't be a syntactic distinction - it gets in the way of doing
>  the job.

But, there is no syntactic distinction.  There is a rhematic
distinction (the word formation rules are different), but I just don't
see why this is bad.

-- 
Raul Deluth Miller-Rockwell                   <rockwell@socrates.umd.edu>