At 11:13 AM +0200 6/6/2000, Marcel Weiher wrote:
>  > From: "Andrew C. Greenberg" <werdna at gate.net>
>
>>  How, exactly, does one hope to maintain a system of any size or
>>  written by a group of any size where each component is written in its 
>>  own "pluggable" syntax?
>
>Subsystems.  Interfaces.

I suppose you folks are more optimistic than I about a team's 
capacity for maintaining software in such an environment, where the 
pretty-printer fixes code to suit each programmer's style.

This now means that a programmer sitting at a terminal to work some 
code must not only review the code itself, but must also study the 
corpus of syntax definitions and pretty printer settings, hoping that 
nothing has been set in, well, a "surprising" fashion.

Trying to recall whether a particular fileout or code excerpt is 
properly cannonicalized seems itself a special problem.  Trying to 
teach Smalltalk in such an environment seems virtually impossible.

It seems to me quite naive to think that this, as it introduces 
several new degrees of freedom in expressiveness in a langauge, will 
not with that introduce several orders of magnitude in complexity of 
development and maintenance.

How are we to even DISCUSS code in a diverse open forum, when our 
code itself must first be qualified by the parameters of our operator 
precedence settings?

I remind the community that this is an open source project, and hence 
a development effort undertaken by a large number of people.  Even 
providing features such as parameterized precedence for binary 
operators seems to me a recipe for failure.
-- 
Andrew C. Greenberg		acg at netwolves.com
V.P. Eng., R&D, 		813.885.2779 (office)
Netwolves Corporation		813.885.2380 (facsimile)
www.netwolves.com