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