Semicolons: mostly unnecessary? Also, language oriented programming

[Nick Sabalausky]

"Yigal Chripun" <yigal100 at gmail.com> wrote in message
news:hbuc2i$11pn$1 at digitalmars.com...
> If we are at the topic of language syntax:
> Have you ever heard of MPS by Jetbrains?
> MPS (meta programming system) is a tool to design your own language 
> complete with an IDE, and everything else you get for a modern language.
>
> The way MPS is implemented is interesting since they do away completely 
> with working with text, parsing and lexing.
> the language is defined directly at the AST level - as nodes with rules 
> and types.
> the editor is a structural editor that allows you to fill cells according 
> to the defined nodes.
>
> it's analogous to an XML editor where you define an xsd (node structure 
> and their types/semantics) and the editor allows you to manipulate the 
> tree structure directly. the structure is always well defined by the tree 
> structure and there's no need to have statement separators or line 
> continuations.
>

(That's weird, this message dissapeared from the server. Re-posting.)

That's an idea I've had for some of the langauge processing stuff I've been
working on. Just tried that program and, OMG...I thought eclipse was
bloated, but this MPS makes eclipse look like notepad. Seriously. I didn't
think that was even possible. Just starting a new project took roughly five
minutes of processing. And then the lag on text entry was consistently at
least half a second per character. And on top of all that, the program has
one of the worst cases of invisible-text-and-controls-syndrome I've seen.

I do still think it's a great idea, buy their implementation needs a lot of
work.