Declaration syntax

[Boyd]

On Wednesday, 8 January 2014 at 09:46:23 UTC, Tobias Pankrath 
wrote:
> 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.

I agree that you wouldn't want code to be precisely constraint to 
what's syntactically correct. Function bodies in particular 
benefit quite a bit from just manually typing text. But a tree 
structure of all modules, classes, functions, properties, etc..., 
would go a long way.