Declaration syntax

[Boyd]

On Wednesday, 8 January 2014 at 16:31:06 UTC, H. S. Teoh wrote:
> On Wed, Jan 08, 2014 at 08:47:21AM +0000, Boyd wrote:
> [...]
>> 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.
>
> I disagree with that direction. The advantage of a text format 
> is that
> it can represent *anything* (suitably serialized, of course), 
> and that
> when things go wrong with your tools (IDE corrupts the file, or 
> doesn't
> support certain operations, or, for that matter, you're working 
> in an
> environment where no IDE is available and all you have is a 
> bare-bones
> text editor), you have a way of reaching into the data and 
> fixing it
> yourself. Having a custom binary representation of the code 
> makes it
> impossible to manipulate outside of the IDE, which makes data 
> recovery
> very time-consuming or impossible.
>
> That's not to say that plain text is the best representation 
> for code,
> of course. But I have yet to find an alternative that doesn't 
> suck, and
> that offers advantages that plain text can't offer. This isn't 
> the first
> time this idea came up. I've heard of many attempts to replace 
> text
> representation for code, and all of them sucked. If you think 
> you have a
> superior representation, please convince me otherwise.
>
>
> T
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I'm not suggesting getting rid of all plain text, but I'm
definitely for replacing most of the text we need to define
structural information.

Furthermore, a custom binary implementation wouldn't be a problem
as long as there is a well defined exchange format that all IDE's
would share. This could simply be the code files we use now.

I agree that current alternatives are less than stellar. I think
that's mostly because any attempts either go too far (visual
programming), or not nearly far enough (just listing the
available objects).

Unfortunately I don't have anything concrete. Only ideas, that I
will eventually try to work out, when I have the time. (Don't
hold your breath)

I do wish that programmers would be more open to such ideas.
There is too much pointless bickering about miniscule syntactic
changes, yet no one seems to be interested in fixing the archaic
use of plain text files.