Template instantiation syntax

[Bent Rasmussen]

It's more appropriate to commend you for this initiative. Maybe some better 
syntax will come out of it and until then it will make the code easier on 
your eyes (and who knows how many others). The opposition smacks more of 
"syntactic conservatism" than anything else. . - Hm, what other interesting 
kinds of syntactic transformation might one do. - More use of unicode 
symbols for one thing.

In fact the days of "one language one syntax" is about to come to an end it 
would appear. This is witnessed by the massive hype surrounding 
domain-specific languages atm - perhaps spun off by Intentional Programming 
where demonstrations show radically different presentations for the same 
underlying abstract syntax.

In the XML world we see binary XML Information Set (Infoset) formalisations 
where the abstract syntax remains more or less invariant but the 
serialization syntax changes drastically. The added bonus here being, 
amongst others, that no human will be able to write this syntax by hand, 
meaning instantiations will be machine-verified - no human err, except those 
programmed into the editors, object models and serializers. Of course 
oppinions on the pros and cons of this vary much.

- Bent

"Andrei Alexandrescu" <SeeWebsiteForEmail at erdani.org> skrev i meddelelsen 
news:gcr17d$1n25$1 at digitalmars.com...
> Dave wrote:
[...]
>> When Andrei writes his articles and books, which would he use in the 
>> text?
>
> The standard notation. The fact that I'd be using whatever editor 
> embellishments is irrelevant, and in fact I find it a bit bizarre that you 
> even care about that. Is my use of syntax coloring an issue as well?
>
>> I mean Andrei can setup emacs anyway he wants, but this also smacks of 
>> something being "blessed" by the language designer.
>>
>> More lunacy! <g>
>>
>> Let's all take a deep breath any think this through a little longer...
>
> A deep breath is sure what I needed after reading your post.
>
>
> Andrei
>