1: string cat is an old and reliable horsehide drum. I've been
doing C programming recently, where you can concat two literal
strings by having no other language tokens between them. Really.
That's the real basis for repeating the suggestion of juxtaposition
as a string joining operator. Syntactic arguments can all be deflated
by retreating what gets recognized as a string juxtaposition to the
point where it is clear that other things are happenind when other
things are meant to happen. Besides, there's always join('',...).
2: deprecating bitwise ops. I've also been working with C++ recently
where the
bitwise ops, particularly shift-left, were completely overrun and are
rarely missed.
Multiple dispatch means the same syntax can mean completely different
things. A
more perlish solution to the situation might be, since bitwise ops are
used rarely, to
explicitly bring them in with a pragma.
{
use bitwiseops;
...
}
3: I propose "means" as a postfix macro indicator. Macros are not
allowed to alter
the blocking structure, theymust be block-sane (like Lisp, unlike C).
Tokens on both sides are the pieces that get replaced. Tokens and other
syntax on the
left that does not appear on the right is the pattern that will get
matched to invoke the
macro. The right hand side guides the rewriting.
No reserved begin and end markers are required because of the blocking
sanity
requirement. For example
for( initialize ; test ; increment ) body
means
{initialize ; while (test) {body ; increment }}
;
thanks
--
David Nicol, independent consultant and contractor 312 587
2868
"For every old blackboard there are now hundreds of new electronic
computers"
