21 Jun
2006
21 Jun
'06
9:34 p.m.
John R. wrote:
On 6/21/06, Don Y <dgy at dakotacom.net> wrote:
Yes, it seems that doing away with punctuation (FORTH, LISP, etc.)
really bastardizes syntax into non-intuitive forms. Sure, they
"make sense" for their consistency, etc. but they seem to move
even further away from "friendly" than punctuation-rich
approaches.
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.