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2 points by rocketnia 4199 days ago | link | parent

"What I really want is to use juxtaposition to indicate higher precedence"

I think I first heard of that idea from the Gel syntax: http://www.cs.utexas.edu/~wcook/Drafts/2008/gel.pdf

The discussion at http://c2.com/cgi/wiki?SyntacticallySignificantWhitespaceCon... leads to the stillborn Merd language project from 2001-2003, which calls this "horizontal layout": http://merd.sourceforge.net/#features

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"Whoa, whacky idea alert. What if we use whitespace to indicate operator precedence?"

The Merd site mentions that case, too: "experimentation is needed to know if [horizontal layout] could work for more than one space" http://merd.sourceforge.net/choices_syntax.html#6

I've doodled this idea independently a couple of times, but I see a few issues:

1. Line breaks throw a monkey wrench in the works (though it might be reasonable to prohibit line breaks within { ... }).

2. In many contexts, it can be tough to count spaces. :)

3. Sometimes it's nice to tabulate similar lines of code using extra spaces, and in those cases this feature would be a minor annoyance, since it would force some subexpressions to bail out to parentheses.

  // Horizontal layout interferes:
  var wargle         =   2 * x + 0.03  * y +  200;
  var tricennarious  =  13 * x + 0.4   * y +   50;
  
  // Fix:
  var wargle         =   2 * x + (0.03  * y) +  200;
  var tricennarious  =  13 * x + (0.4   * y) +   50;


1 point by akkartik 4199 days ago | link

Alternatively:

  var wargle           =     2 * x   +   0.03 * y   +   200;
  var tricennarious    =    13 * x   +   0.4  * y   +    50;
Adding tabulation in addition to whitespace precedence would end up making expressions even more loose and baggy than otherwise. The writer would have to count spaces, but it's fairly clean when reading.

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Thanks for the pointers! I'm going to go look at those now.

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1 point by akkartik 4197 days ago | link

I've also been reading about J (http://www.jsoftware.com/help/primer/contents.htm; via the recent http://arclanguage.org/item?id=16728), which might provide some interesting ideas.

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