On Thu, Feb 14, 2013 at 1:18 AM, Monte Goulding <[email protected]
> wrote:
> Lol... I guess you'd want to be careful not to bloat the engine with
> syntax for edge cases but I get your point. I like:
>
>From a technical standpoint, if I understand how RR is planning to handle
language extensions, this would be more of a library thing than an engine
thing. You'd be able to load grammars selectively.
>From a conceptual standpoint, I think the syntax itself is critical to
this. Your example
trim each line of x
That is as clear as day, much clearer than my more generic and less
grammatical
apply function trim to each line of x
...which is part of the point. Let's say that I share my syntax. You like
the functionality but tsk, tsk the way I've phrased it. You rewrite what I
put out (should be easy) and re-release. The market speaks, and a week from
now everyone is using
trim each line of x
bold word 1 of each line of fld "display"
add 5 to the last item of each element of Z
...and so on. Good syntax wins, and any edge cases or bad syntaxes are lost
in the mist. In other words, the examples that will survive are the ones
like chunk expressions, which are blindingly clear to any english-speaker,
and where once you use them, you wonder how you ever got along without
them.
Putting it another way, more powerful abstractions are better.
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