well, you already make whitespace significant by saying that alphabeta is not alpha beta
the real crux of the issue is whether it comes before an identifier or after
don't think of it as whitespace disambiguating
nobody says *pointer in C is "too significant whitespace" just because it can't be separated by a space (in which case it becomes multiply!)
Like I said, I think it's only a bit too far, so if somebody wants to run with that idea, go for it. I personally favor the idea of having multiple syntaxes that parse to the same AST.
I didn't know you couldn't have a space after deref!
But, I dunno.. attaching ';' to identifiers is different from attaching '*'. Our brains are trained to treat the semi-colon as punctuation, never part of a word. Even programming languages have only reinforced this pattern. It's going to be a hard habit to break.
"Our brains are trained to treat the semi-colon as punctuation, never part of a word. Even programming languages have only reinforced this pattern. It's going to be a hard habit to break."
I would personally use something like | if it's not used for anything
it looks like an undirected paren so in cases like a |b| c it translates to a ((b) c) or (a (b)) c
I guess I'd pick the first option (more natural for reading left to right), but for the order of operations it doesn't matter
