Re:Why Perl 6 is different
by stcredzero on Wednesday April 21, 2010 @01:48AM
(#1281487)
The "syntax as infrastructure" idea has been around in many moderately successful incarnations. (Lisp and Smalltalk, to name a couple.) Another way to think of this: shift Syntax into Meta-syntax, so it gets out of the way of the libraries.
No need for "syntax skins" in that case.
Re:Why Perl 6 is different
by loup-vaillant on Tuesday April 20, 2010 @04:30PM
(#1280504)
> you are quite obviously just putting different skins on the same semantics
That was exactly my intention. Translating "at the deeper semantic level" is reserved for actual compilation. Now you may be right about syntax being useful for differentiating languages. My stance right now is that we should try (or look at the failed attempts you speak of, do you have any link?).
Testing my idea will require quite a bit of work: I need to write a compiler and an IDE with some kind disciplined editing. I also will have to bootstrap all this stuff, so it passes the minimum credibility threshold. If I ever get to this point, I will (at last) be able to test my language for actual (f)utility.
Try translating at the deeper semantic level and you also discover that you basically can't. The C-semantic equivalent of the Haskell is closer to a for loop, and even that isn't an exact match. (An exact match probably involves "goto".) Non-trivial examples just explode in complexity, and that's long before you get to useful code.
This is in the class of "things that have been possible for decades but haven't taken off for good reasons", right up there with the purely-visual languages and other classic "good ideas".