kenkeenan

Agreed, but some of these questions-- the ones about indent style in particular-- don't seem to me to be the kind of things a developer needs to be thinking about while they're working on getting code written. The endless bickering and bikeshedding that arguments over coding conventions always result in are one thing, but having these arguments with yourself, every time you write a line of code, is crazy!

A rotating cranium ON FIRE, if you please!

Agreed. I don't have a CS background either and despite reading a few textbooks, I could never grok how one would write a parser for a language. After reading Crenshaw's paper, I was able to put together a quick & dirty scripting language for a text processing program I was writing.

Crenshaw's approach does have downsides; as noted in the article, there's no internal representation of the program so optimisations like short-circuit evaluation of logical operations are difficult, if not impossible...