Alan Kay <Alan.Kay at disney.com> wrote:
> [about BCPL]
> [about ST-72/76/80]
>      This was a really good idea for a while, but started to degenerate
> into a Tower of Babel via poor choices for syntactic forms in the heat of
> programming (even by good programmers).
>      Smalltalk-76 (by Dan) was a really interesting meeting ground between
> a compilable and a readable syntax. Smalltalk-80's syntax (I believe) could
> have adopted a stronger theory of uniformity that would have yielded more
> pleasing results (I don't like it).
>      I still like the idea of easy syntactic extension (and most of the
> possible routes to metaprogramming), but experience seems to say that
> "making it easy" should not generally be the same as "put it at the same
> level of expression". There should be "fences" that you have to jump over
> to do the metaprogramming, but once jumped, the metaprogramming should be
> easy and not obscure .... (Squeak needs a LOT OF WORK to be in accord with
> this principle.)

I have made several postings now, the latest entitled "Syntax & Sematics
<etc>", on a similar theme. I have done some work on programming
language syntaxes (unpublished) and I'm porting this to Squeak now. It
will take some time, but sometime this year, in august lets say,
results should exist. What I hope is that some people in this list will
support the project as it will be an isolated add-on otherwise. To be
the real thing it should be deeply integrated in the system. I believe
that I know how to do this, and I agree a LOT OF WORK is needed, the one
important thing however is what the list wants. I volunteer for part of this work. It is well in line with my research interests and if supported by this forum, the work will be a pleasure.

Some of that work can be done in reasonable time and will be useful. Note that Squeak is already "bisyntactic" some code can be both in ST-80 syntax and C-syntax. The C-parser is missing but easy to incorporate. The general structure for this is also missing and more difficult but not impossible to incorporate.

As for the Tower of Babel syndrom, the way I have in mind is that the
reader of code have a say on how it will loook, not only the writer of
it. I might for instance prefer another syntax than the present and it
will then be possible to look at it entirely within this other syntax.
There is no Tower of Babel arising from that. It remains one syntax.
Or put in another way, the solution to the Tower of Babel syndrome is to have always bijective mappings between the syntaxes. This will restrain invention but without that bad things will happen.

It will look somewhat like this:

A B C
 \ | /
   S
 / | \
X Y Z

Where A, B, C signifies different syntaxes, S is the common ground, a
tree structure, X, Y, Z is implementation techniques for different
machines. In sum total people with different habits of syntaxes can use
Squeak on different machines. Such a system can also translate  A <-> B <-> C via S

Chris Reuter <cgreuter at calum.csclub.uwaterloo.ca>
made a postings entitled
"Re: Proposal4: Show := on fileout / pretty print"
that is in this direction too.
He writes only of writing. It is important to connect reading and writing, whatever is writable should be readable, then the users gets the liberty to choose.

I sincerely hope that some positive response to this will appear.

/Mats Nygren