Comments on Unlimited Novelty: Indentation sensitivity: a post-mortem?

If you want to support templating languages, then ...

2009-03-11T08:37:00.000-07:00

If you want to support templating languages, then you really should support some kind of AST that template languages can compile down into. Generating source code from a template is half-assed at best.

Hey Tony,

While it doesn't suit the express...

2009-03-08T08:37:00.000-07:00

Hey Tony,

While it doesn't suit the expressions-only approach you desire, I came up with a Pythonic way to do Ruby blocks:

* http://tav.espians.com/ruby-style-blocks-in-python.html

Hope it's useful.

Let me know what you think and keep up the great work with Reia!

-- Thanks, tav

You could extend into a second dimension. By that ...

2009-03-05T18:33:00.000-08:00

You could extend into a second dimension. By that I mean that a line of code is a horizontal sequence of terms, but some of those terms could extend vertically. You would need an editor which would let you insert a multi-line section of text into a line. A bit tricky in normal editors, though...

So I was considering a similar problem, since I...

2009-03-05T10:22:00.000-08:00

So I was considering a similar problem, since I'm also trying to design a programming language as a small side project. It's much less serious, and more of a playground for ideas.

For our language, we went the statements/expressions route, but I think you can hack blocks back into a statement grammar. We came up with a syntax something like this:

my_dict.items().each(&) func(k, v):
...
...

The idea is similar to the Ruby innovation of putting the block code outside of the parenthesis as one would have in Lisp. Here, you go further, and just use s simple syntactic placeholder (I picked & since we weren't using it for bitwise and), and just put it at the end of the line. You could nest blocks, but you could not have more than one per statement. It seems like you can't do that in Ruby either, and I think having multiple blocks stuffed into the same statement would be super confusing.

Of course, in your case you'd have to abandon things like:

x = if b
'b'
else
'c'

But we didn't want that syntax anyway.

The force is strong in this one; he will join the ...

2009-03-05T09:57:00.000-08:00