Re:LSP could have been better
by fiddlerwoaroof on Friday October 13, 2023 @04:14AM
(#37868122)
Different syntaxes are better for different purposes: s-expressions are easy to manipulate structurally; significant indentation is often easier to read; etc. Semantics is important, but syntactic noise is too.
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You mean different purposes by humans or different purposes by machines?
For machine manipulation, I think it makes more sense to directly manipulate the AST.
For human manipulation, I think the cognitive overhead of mentally converting between the display syntax and the canonical syntax would far outweighs any gains in readability. But maybe your workflow is different than mine - If you have a lot of custom macros in your editor, I could see s-exps being useful (although, again, I think exposing and directly manipulating the AST would be less error prone)
Re:LSP could have been better
by fiddlerwoaroof on Saturday October 14, 2023 @05:16PM
(#37884343)
A programming language doesn’t need a canonical syntax if its semantics are specified in terms of the data-structures the parser produces and not in terms of the textual representation of those data structures.