🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <36520@uflorida.cis.ufl.edu> gmt@reef.cis.ufl.edu (GMM) writes:
>In article <76207@ut-emx.uucp> andrean@ccwf.cc.utexas.edu (Andre Arianto Nurwo
>
>>Well ? Would upgrading of the greatly readable, standard Pascal
>>be worth the effort, or is everyone already comfortable with the
>>cryptic {}!|\n C has to offer ?
>>
>>Any comments ?
>>Just a crazily passing thought, he he he :) :)
>
>Come on!  This is ridiculous!	Once you are told once what {} mean, is it
>cryptic at all?  Maybe we should all program in COBOL.  (Sarcasm intended.)
>These symbols are a basic part of the language which can be easily
>understood by the reader of a program after, oh, maybe one time of being
>told what they mean.  How does verbosity make a good language?  Truly, I
>have no problem with Turbo Pascal and in fact I used to use it a lot, but I
>think you need to come up with better reasons to slam another language than
>your lack of understanding of its symbols.

Am I having fun yet?

Actually, there is, at least for me, a good reason to use a slightly
longer form for most constructs (NOT as long as Cobol - yech!). That is
that I can pronounce them in my mind in a reasonable way. [It occurs to
me that this likely doesn't work as well for non-English speakers, when
the language uses English keywords!] Compare

C:				pronounced:
    if (a && b) {		    if a and b
	...				dot dot dot :-)
    }				    <silence>

Draco:				pronounced:
    if a and b then		    if a and b then
	...				dot dot dot
    fi				    fie

The structure is pronounced in Draco, but not in C. Also, using different
matching keywords for things like 'if', 'while', etc. means that the
compiler again has better chances of detecting your typos earlier. Pascal
also has this same problem because it uses BEGIN/END pretty much the same
as C uses {/} for compound statements.

--
Chris Gray   alberta!ami-cg!cg	 or   cg%ami-cg@CS.UAlberta.CA