Re:The naked truth about writing a programming language (2014)
by kyllo on Sunday May 03, 2020 @06:22PM
(#23062368)
Yes and programming languages are human interfaces to machine instructions, so context sensitivity can be manageable and even desirable to human users of the language, even if it makes the implementation of the language interpreter more complex or less elegant. Programming language designers make this trade-off all the time.
The classic example, I guess, is the most vexing parse: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Most_vexing_parse
"""
The line
is seemingly ambiguous, since it could be interpreted either as """These things you can only resolve by having the symbol tables around and checking. The parser alone can't tell.
A language could avoid this i.e. by requiring specific keywords or having more distinct syntax.
Humans (programmers) however often can deal with ambiguity, we have it in humannlanaguage as well and context on most cases helps and I argue those aren't practical problems. (While that's only opinion)