binary selectors ambiguity and space

Dan Ingalls Dan at SqueakLand.org
Wed May 17 15:06:57 UTC 2006


Wolfgang Helbig <helbig at Lehre.BA-Stuttgart.DE>  wrote...

>you explained:
>>Well, the *idea* was that you should not need spaces, and St-76, 
>>borrowing from
>>APL, had a different character for the semantically different high-minus sign
>
>What's so bad about needing spaces? After all, the space key is one of the
>easiest to hit :-). And spaces are already required as separators between
>keywords and argument names, aren't they?. It seems quite natural to require
>spaces as separators between a binary selector and a "special character" like
>minus.
>
>Then you could get rid of the special treatment of the minus 
>character. That is,
>the minus character would be allowed as a second character of a 
>binary selector.

I think we've pretty much exhausted this topic, but I did want to 
respond to your query.

What is so bad about needing spaces?
Truth is, I think it's probably the best solution to the ambiguity. 
It happens so infrequently that it's not a problem for people who 
want no spaces, and it has the nice effect that anyone who *doesn't 
yet know* the rule will intuitively know the parse (this is my one 
objection to the current state of affairs -- it fairly radiates 
ambiguity).  But I also don't want to rock the boat and, as I get 
older, that seems to be more of a problem (literally and figuratively 
;-).

Now the other side of your question, which I take to be
Why do you want to write expressions without spaces?
This is a stylistic thing and it truly varies for me depending on 
what kind of code I am writing.  I like to be able to write "a+1" 
with no spaces when I think of it (and want the reader to see it) as 
effectively a single symbol.  Other times I want the reader to think 
about the fact that we add one here, and then I write "a + 1".  I 
like having the choice between these two modes of expression, and 
that's why I want to be able to leave out the spaces.

	- Dan
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