81–90 of 160 posts
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Ngl, I think that's brilliant. Braces matching the wrong brace is like a daily occurrence. It's such a tedious small thing that constantly hounds me whenever I'm writing code
Most programming languages now support reformatters out of the box. Part of the point of those is to make mismatched closing braces more visible.
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Ada, at least, uses begin...end in part because it prevents certain kinds of errors. In its syntax you have to specify what you are ending, reducing the risk of invalid matches and increasing the likelihood of the error report system guessing correctly what you intended . E.g.: if X > 0 then Y := 0; end if; Curly braces are shorter, but a close curly brace will match any open curly brace. Such is the nature of trade-…
Ngl, I think that's brilliant. Braces matching the wrong brace is like a daily occurrence. It's such a tedious small thing that constantly hounds me whenever I'm writing code
Like this, except replace "..." with many lines of code.
if (z.p == z.p.p.left) {
...
} else { // z.p != z.p.p.left
...
} // ifI def have a soft spot for Pascal. And I think Niklaus Wirth deserves more recognition in broader circles for his foundational work with pcode, compilers, Oberon, etc. I learned Pascal like many of us growing up in the early PC era and never could look at BASIC the same way again (or respect Gates for his love of it, lol). I think having such a highly structured language at a young age did wonders. But these days fol…
> But these days folks are mostly used to the C style syntax. And I'm not even arguing that it is a better language than C or others. But the whole industry has gone overall into believing that anything newly 'invented' is good and anything that's been around a while is passé Problem of the Pascal syntax is that it prevents adoption of certain constructs, which are just not nice. A few examples - lambda expression: `…
I def have a soft spot for Pascal. And I think Niklaus Wirth deserves more recognition in broader circles for his foundational work with pcode, compilers, Oberon, etc. I learned Pascal like many of us growing up in the early PC era and never could look at BASIC the same way again (or respect Gates for his love of it, lol). I think having such a highly structured language at a young age did wonders. But these days fol…
> But these days folks are mostly used to the C style syntax. And I'm not even arguing that it is a better language than C or others. But the whole industry has gone overall into believing that anything newly 'invented' is good and anything that's been around a while is passé Problem of the Pascal syntax is that it prevents adoption of certain constructs, which are just not nice. A few examples - lambda expression: `…
So, much of what you are complaining is largely pointless syntactic sugar issues, like people complaining about the difficulty of typing "begin" vs "{" when any modern editor can autocomplete, and nevermind the difficult parts of programming are rarely the limit on how fast one can type 5 characters vs 1. I might even go so far as to say, slowing down a bit probably actually increases the code quality.
(PS: I've programmed professionally in pretty much every mainstream language and quite a number that aren't mainstream. IMHO Object Pascal strikes a far better balance of performant code, ease of development and maintenance, and developer safety than most of the languages in modern use, maybe all of them. Its frankly a shame that more places don't take it more seriously and would rather invent yet another poor half baked language that takes another few thousand man years of effort for the compiler writers and the users to overcome as they are discovered).
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Delphi was really a "Concorde moment" in that it was actually rapid , both in terms of development speed, and performance, which was somehow forgotten as the web emerged. Forgotten to the point that people thought Visual Basic was a good idea.
Delphi was great but a major deal breaker was that is was not free to use.
OTOH, As many tool vendors will tell you its foolish to dismiss a tool simply based on price. If your paying your developers $100 an hour even tiny improvements in productivity can easily pay for a $1000 or more tool. Just the compilation speed alone vs C/etc is probably worth the 5+ mins a day in savings.
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Historically, the point of writing 'begin' and 'end' instead of using curly braces was mostly support for non-ASCII character sets where the curly braces are not included. It's why C also has an alternate syntax using and COBOL goes as far as writing out arithmetical operators as English text, such as DIVIDE x INTO y GIVING z.
Ada, at least, uses begin...end in part because it prevents certain kinds of errors. In its syntax you have to specify what you are ending, reducing the risk of invalid matches and increasing the likelihood of the error report system guessing correctly what you intended . E.g.: if X > 0 then Y := 0; end if; Curly braces are shorter, but a close curly brace will match any open curly brace. Such is the nature of trade-…
The reverse-reserved-word convention like ‘fi’ to end an if block in shell (and other?) languages seems like it functions this way too.
And I guess significant indentation also does this job, albeit with some of its own hazards.
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I'm surprised that you draw a sharp distinction between C and Pascal syntax. They have a shared lineage and are really very close to each other. Yeah, curly braces won over "begin" and "end", but that's not a matter of some huge conceptual rift, just convenience. There are numerous languages today, including Haskell and Ocaml, that are far more removed from the Algol lineage than these two. Heck, the differences betw…
One huge difference between C and Pascal grammars us that Pascal is LR(1), so it can be parsed easily, which helps one-pass translation. It also helps humans read it. C, on the other hand, has needlessly complicated syntax; a function definition is hard to detect, and a pointer to a function is hard to interpret, because it's literally convoluted: https://c-faq.com/decl/spiral.anderson.html Sadly, this is a general s…
I def have a soft spot for Pascal. And I think Niklaus Wirth deserves more recognition in broader circles for his foundational work with pcode, compilers, Oberon, etc. I learned Pascal like many of us growing up in the early PC era and never could look at BASIC the same way again (or respect Gates for his love of it, lol). I think having such a highly structured language at a young age did wonders. But these days fol…
Mostly, but I'm told the new Austral[1] language has syntax very similar to that of Pascal's.
I def have a soft spot for Pascal. And I think Niklaus Wirth deserves more recognition in broader circles for his foundational work with pcode, compilers, Oberon, etc. I learned Pascal like many of us growing up in the early PC era and never could look at BASIC the same way again (or respect Gates for his love of it, lol). I think having such a highly structured language at a young age did wonders. But these days fol…
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I was under the impression that COBOL's English syntax was intended to be a more human-readable approach, not so much a workaround for character set limitations.
Maybe both? COBOL predates the first draft of ASCII by several years. Character sets were far from standardized in those days.