Declaration syntax

Tobias Pankrath tobias at pankrath.net
Wed Jan 8 01:46:21 PST 2014


On Wednesday, 8 January 2014 at 08:47:23 UTC, Boyd wrote:
> If you're out for easier code readability, then I'd recommend 
> not to bother with syntax too much. It'll only get you a slight 
> readability increase at most, and you'll piss off anyone who 
> doesn't agree with you, or doesn't want to refactor his code.
>
> I've been experimenting with language design a bit and I found 
> that a much bigger issue with coding, is that we still use 
> files and plain text. An IDE where code is represented in a 
> simple tree and saved in a database, for example, would improve 
> things dramatically, and no language changes would be necessary.

It wouldn't. When I was working for a SAP consulting company, I 
wrote some parts of ABAP, which is stored in the database of the 
SAP system itself and only accessible via the build in "IDE". I 
would have killed for an decent IDE but there was no way to easy 
access the code directly. Programming text are nothing more than 
serialized tree data structures stored in a common format.

Actually there was a EMACS plugin for "language-directed" coding, 
where the editor knew the code structure and you could only enter 
syntactically valid code. Like a "snippet plugin" on steroids. 
However the author of the plugin itself admitted that this was a 
wrong direction and is back to text editing.


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