Re:What Made Lisp Different (2002)
by fiddlerwoaroof on Sunday February 18, 2018 @04:39PM
(#16408874)
Well, the “right” way to do it would be to make the textual representation of the syntax a view layer concern and not the format in which the code was serialized. For example, you could store everything as s-expressions or some binary representation of an AST and then have a lens that pretty prints the code with the programmers preferred syntax and the reverses the programmer’s edits to the underlying serialization format.
I suspect this would work best for an image-based smalltalk-like system where the “source of truth” would be the version of the code persisted in the image and then the textual representation would be generated from that on demand.
Re:What Made Lisp Different (2002)
by fiddlerwoaroof on Sunday February 18, 2018 @07:38PM
(#16409894)
A really interesting extension of this is to use lisp-style symbols instead of strings to represent variables, which would make it possible to localize the functions and keywords of your language so that a developer could collaborate in his/her preferred language.
> The result: except for some geeks people have decided that they prefer the C# syntax and it seems to me that Microsoft thus slowly tries to fade out VB.net.
Not really, VB.NET enjoys much more MS love than F#.
Just check the tooling and documentation at MSDN, or the set of languages supported for UWP development.
> > The result: except for some geeks people have decided that they prefer the C# syntax and it seems to me that Microsoft thus slowly tries to fade out VB.net.
> Not really, VB.NET enjoys much more MS love than F#.
This is surely true, but in my opinion F# is more different from C#/VB.net than "just being for most parts a different code representation". So I would consider F# as an independent programming language - which indeed seems to be fallen out of favor by MS.
Microsoft tried something very similar with C# vs VB.net (in the early days of .net there were even more experiments like J#). There exist tools to convert quite seamlessly between C# and VB.net code.
The result: except for some geeks people have decided that they prefer the C# syntax and it seems to me that Microsoft thus slowly tries to fade out VB.net.
So it rather seems to me that people don't like it if there are multiple coexisting syntaxes, because even if there are good converters available, it is still an inconvenience that wastes at least some productivity by mere existence of the multiple syntaxes.