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A comment on Great Works in Programming Languages (2004). Parent comment

Re:Great Works in Programming Languages (2004) by octo_t on Thursday June 13, 2013 @11:25AM (#5874536)
There is interesting stuff about notation (in my opinion to do with parsing but perhaps thats my bias speaking), but people being "picky" about notation is theoretically dull.
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Re:Great Works in Programming Languages (2004) by arethuza on Thursday June 13, 2013 @11:31AM (#5874575)
But perhaps that is because nobody has developed a theory to explain why some notations are better than others!
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Re:Great Works in Programming Languages (2004) by octo_t on Thursday June 13, 2013 @01:58PM (#5875509)
If you're interested, "Programming Language Syntax and Semantics" by D. A. Watt, and "Syntax of Programming Languages: Theory and Practice" by R. C. Backhouse is probably useful in answering some of those questions.

In reality, notation is in the eye of the beholder. Some people like brackets and braces to split up the flow, where as some prefer whitespace as delimiters. There are papers out there on this (which I can't find right now).

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