Semicolons: mostly unnecessary? Also, language oriented programming

Nick Sabalausky a at a.a
Sat Oct 24 13:38:59 PDT 2009


"Yigal Chripun" <yigal100 at gmail.com> wrote in message 
news:hbuc2i$11pn$1 at digitalmars.com...
> If we are at the topic of language syntax:
> Have you ever heard of MPS by Jetbrains?
> MPS (meta programming system) is a tool to design your own language 
> complete with an IDE, and everything else you get for a modern language.
>
> The way MPS is implemented is interesting since they do away completely 
> with working with text, parsing and lexing.
> the language is defined directly at the AST level - as nodes with rules 
> and types.
> the editor is a structural editor that allows you to fill cells according 
> to the defined nodes.
>
> it's analogous to an XML editor where you define an xsd (node structure 
> and their types/semantics) and the editor allows you to manipulate the 
> tree structure directly. the structure is always well defined by the tree 
> structure and there's no need to have statement separators or line 
> continuations.
>

That's an idea I've had for some of the langauge processing stuff I've been 
working on. Just tried that program and, OMG...I thought eclipse was 
bloated, but this MPS makes eclipse look like notepad. Seriously. I didn't 
think that was even possible. Just starting a new project took roughly five 
minutes of processing. And then the lag on text entry was consistently at 
least half a second per character. And on top of all that, the program has 
one of the worst cases of invisible-text-and-controls-syndrome I've seen.

I do still think it's a great idea, buy their implementation needs a lot of 
work.





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