Date: Sat, 11 Aug 2001 16:19:02 -0700 (PDT) From: Matt Dillon <dillon@earth.backplane.com> To: John Merryweather Cooper <jmcoopr@webmail.bmi.net> Cc: tlambert2@mindspring.com, Rob <europax@home.com>, "hackers @ FreeBSD . ORG" <hackers@FreeBSD.ORG> Subject: Re: the =+ operator Message-ID: <200108112319.f7BNJ2020598@earth.backplane.com> References: <3B73F0BC.548D40B3@home.com> <3B757D14.B344931@mindspring.com> <20010811121857.A41578@johncoop>
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When I was writing DICE I spent a whole 5 seconds considering the merits
of the old =-, =+, etc... notation. Because that's all it took for me
to come to the obvious conclusion that the old style notation was a pile
of crap that only made everyone's lives more difficult - not just the
poor sod (that's me) writing the compiler, but also the programmers,
reviewers, and testers as well. The whole process of writing and
testing code was positively impacted when those old style notations
became illegal.
And, for the record, the whitespace-ignoring bit has nothing to do with
the lexing/parsing issue. Nothing at all whatsoever to do with it.
Even in a modern compiler a construct like "+ =" is illegal. Whitespace
is not ignored, it was simply clarified. The real problem with the old
stuff was always human readability, debuggability, and lack of robustness.
And... DICE still has the fastest one-pass lexer/parser on the planet.
I just had to throw that in there :-) Too bad it only generates 68000
output.
:"Style" is the essense of the best programming. Good programmers have it,
:the rest suffer for want of it . . .
:
:jmc
... Amen.
-Matt
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