@property - take it behind the woodshed and shoot it?

TommiT tommitissari at hotmail.com
Sun Jan 27 07:09:09 PST 2013


On Sunday, 27 January 2013 at 14:14:18 UTC, Dicebot wrote:
> Text is still most efficient form of providing information. 
> Please call me back when something better will be invented. 
> Then we can speak about minimal editing environment for it.

Okay, here's what I invented in 5 minutes that would be better 
than plain text:

* Arguments to a function call would go, instead of inside 
parentheses, inside a box with a solid, black border and some 
nice and unique background color.

* Template arguments would go in a box with a hatched border line 
and a different background color.

* Blocks are, instead of surrounded by braces, indicated by this 
thing that looks like a tall, black, thin, right-opening square 
bracket that spans the whole block and sits directly to the left 
of the left-most characters of the statements inside the block.

* Instead of having '*' indicate both "multiply" and 
"dereference", invent and use a new symbol that means 
"dereference". The same goes for all symbols, like '&', '!', '~', 
'@', that don't have a universally defined meaning that 
corresponds to its meaning in language X.

In order to input those "things that are not symbols found on 
your keyboard", you'd either need to learn keyboard shortcuts by 
heart, or use a custom keyboard, which is what tv and movie 
editors have done for 20 years with their Avid keyboards. Most 
other creative jobs require custom tools for performing the 
craft, why not programming?


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