At 02:14 PM 4/12/2001 -0700, Larry Wall wrote:
>David Whipp writes:
>: You may be right that there are no useful literals other than
>: strings, integers, reals and lists. OTOH, if we are going to
>: construct a meta-language which supports multiple syntaxes,
>: then it is very likely that each application-specific language
>: would have its own literals. The question becomes whether perl
>: itself should have this ability.
>
>What he said. To my mind, the question boils down to limiting the
>scope of a syntactic rule borrowed from another lingo.
[Snip]
>Just because the general is visiting a particular trench doesn't mean
>he plans to set up headquarters there. There are broader issues at
>stake. So I'd appreciate it if my soldiers would refrain from killing
>each other over what color to paint the foxhole.
While this is reasonably true (and reasonably reasonable) it's not entirely
to the point. If we're going to provide a mechanism to define the syntax of
a mini-language (or a maxi one, I suppose, though there are probably better
ways to do it) then the details of colons and constants and what-have-yous
are pretty close to irrelevant.
If we can redefine the entire world then, well, we can redefine the world.
It doesn't really much matter the shape of Africa if we're building Europa.
Dan
--------------------------------------"it's like this"-------------------
Dan Sugalski even samurai
[EMAIL PROTECTED] have teddy bears and even
teddy bears get drunk
