tolf and detab (language succinctness)

[Bruno Medeiros]

On 01/10/2010 12:54, bearophile wrote:
> Bruno Medeiros:
>
>>  From my understanding, Scala is a "scalable language" in the sense
>> that it easy to add new language features, or something similar to that.
>
> I see. You may be right.
>
>
>> But I'm missing your point here, what does Ada have to do with this?
>
> Ada has essentially died for several reasons, but in my opinion one of them is the amount of code you have to write to do even small things. If you design a language that is not handy to write small programs, you have a higher risk of seeing your language die.
>
>

There are a lot of things in a language that, if they make it harder to 
write small programs, they will also make it harder for larger programs. 
(sometimes even much harder)
I'm no expert in ADA, and there are many things that will affect the 
success of the language, so I can't comment in detail. But from a 
cursory look at the language, it looks terribly terse. That "begin" "end 
<name of block>" syntax is awful. I already think just "begin" "end" 
syntax is bad, but also having to repeat the name of 
block/function/procedure/loop at the "end", that's awful. Is it trying 
to compete with "XML" ? :p


>> but I simply didn't see much language
>> changes that could have made my D more succint,
>
> Making a language more succint is easy, you may take a look at J or K languages. The hard thing is to design a succint language that is also readable and not bug-prone.
>

Indeed, I agree. And that was the spirit of that original comment:
First of all, I meant succinct not only in character and line count but 
also syntactical and semantic constructs. And succinct without changes 
that would impact a lot the readability or safety of the code. (as 
mentioned in "barring crazy stuff like dynamic scoping")

>> barring crazy stuff like dynamic scoping)
>
> I don't know what dynamic scoping is, do you mean that crazy nice thing named dynamic typing? :-)
>

Like Pete explained, it's indeed exactly "dynamic scoping" that I meant.

-- 
Bruno Medeiros - Software Engineer