21 Jun
2006
21 Jun
'06
2:50 p.m.
On 6/21/06, Don Y <dgy at dakotacom.net> wrote:
Amusingly, *except* for parens, LISP largely does
without punctuation!
Unfortunately, parens are a royal PITA as they require tracking
more state than local punctuation.
And RPN languages like Forth can even do away with parentheses.
However I don't know that you could call Forth "punctuation free" or
even Regular (in the sense of not needing a parser). In general Forth
is processed one word at a time with an ad hoc lexer + smarts. Some
words read ahead in the input stream, and state during parsing is
important.
-- John.