>Thanks for all the answers,
>so, for better portability, maybe we should dissallow opals current
behavior
>and only accept "-5" and not "- 5" as negative numbers?
Hi Nicolai,
perhaps. if you mean portability pharo->otherLanguage certainly. if you
mean otherLanguage->pharo, well you are the specialist, i only know
pharo and squeak as smalltalk dialects. of course you know that there
exist non-OO-languages that return the same result as opal if you enter
"1 + - 2 -->-1". and of course i know that if i want to translate
something from those other languages, deleting a <space> is the most
simple of my problems.
changing the pov slightly, when do you have to enter a negative number
in a program by hand? essentially only if you use that number as a
constant (apart from tests of course). numbers are entered often
automatically from outside files. ok, then you have those parsers that
read in a string in a more flexible way. but wouldnt it make sense if
the compiler reacts somewhat similar to those parsers? i for example do
have a program, where the user, admittedly not a usual user but
essentially me, enters simple inequalities (and here negative numbers
are very common) as strings and the compiler eats those strings more or
less directly without any additional parser put in between.
i realize that with your reply you'd prefer a fact based argumentation
and i readily admit that as a simple user, i see it simple stupid
emotionally. if i understand pharo's history correctly, it came into
existence because some language developers wanted more freedom. of
course syntax controls thinking. i dont have any real problems if you
disallow - 5, i use -5 anyway, if it makes sense do it, you are the
specialist. but what comes next? will everything you enter into nautilus
automatically be pretty-printed? i understand that pharo has grown up
now, and it makes complete sense to me that it wants to play with the
big boys. perhaps you need a clear-cut simple structured syntax to get
accepted by the business community, but not every businessman is a
complete idiot and for example mathematica, which understands "1 + - 2",
_is_ occasionally used to make some real money. i'd think about how far
i'd wanna go with this thought control thing. so much <friendly grin>
for my personal pov.
werner
