On May 14, 2008, at 6:47 PM, Jason Johnson wrote:

>>
> All dialects have a way to modify the parser don't they (probably a
> really simple way in many of them)?

I don't think that Dolphin or GemStone/S have ways of modifying the  
parser.

> ... the maintenance cost comes from
> how much code is there, not how much was typed.  This is a huge
> problem Java has.  Java wizards say "It doesn't matter how verbose the
> syntax is, I just generate all the boilerplate".  But that doesn't
> help the guy maintaining the code very much.

I thought that with Smalltalk we claim that the more verbose code was  
helpful for maintenance. I'd much rather have keyword selectors than  
comma-separated arguments. Also, I don't care much for syntactic  
shortcuts like dynamic constructors. Although people describe Lisp as  
simple, I keep getting lost on the meaning of a single forward quote,  
a single backward quote, a double quote, a comma, etc. One of the  
early languages I learned was M (aka, MUMPS), where the semicolon had  
four different meanings, depending on the context. Of course, we  
weren't conserving characters for the programmers or for the  
maintainers, but for the machine--each user had 2 KB for code and data.

James Foster