Possibly silly (newbie) question about "plap: X" ="plap(X)"

Bob Arning arning at charm.net
Sat Feb 16 12:41:38 UTC 2002


On Sat, 16 Feb 2002 13:06:21 +0100 Maarten Maartensz <maartens at xs4all.nl> wrote:
>Intuitively one - if one thinks like me - would expect that the setting of
>an alternative syntax DISPLAY should have NO effect on how the code it
>displays is or is not RUN.

I think the point to consider here is that it's not a question of how code runs, but of how it compiles. Code that is already compiled will run just fine regardless of the alternative syntax setting. What will change is that if you have some code typed into a workspace and try to doIt (or printIt, inspectIt, etc), then that textual representation must first be compiled and it is the setting of the preference that determines how to interpret/compile that text (i.e. what language is it that we are compiling, anyway?). I'm not sure it would be possible or desirable to have the compiler guessing which variant the user intended when writing some snippet.

Cheers,
Bob



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