🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <ROCKWELL.92Apr13215324@socrates.umd.edu> rockwell@socrates.umd.edu (Raul Deluth Miller-Rockwell) writes:
|Stephen P Spackman:
|   I'm NOT suggesting having no fixed syntax (there are very GOOD
|   reasons not to want that, including implementability and
|   readability). Just that if I want to write a function called
|	      "if ... represents ... then ... end"
|   the fact that there is one called
|	      "if ... then ... else ... end"
|   in the language core shouldn't stop me. Surely you see the
|   difference?
|
|What is it, here, which is fixed?

The SYNTAX. The fact that a keyword construction has the form

	{keyword expression} "end"

Not the choice of identifiers, but where they are placed and how they
are related. How am I failing to communicate?

|I've never programmed in PL/1.  But I'm not sure what you're saying.
|For instance, in your above example, is the syntax of the word
|'represents' independent of the identifier 'represents'?  If so, how
|does this make it easier to read the code?  If not, could you give an
|example of what you're saying?

The identifier in question is if-represents-then-end. Its syntax is as
in my explanation above. Just as when I say f(x), the identifier of
the function is f (which is user-definable) while its
syntax-of-invocation is

	identifier "(" expression ")"

which is fixed.
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stephen p spackman         Center for Information and Language Studies
stephen@estragon.uchicago.edu                    University of Chicago
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