[ There is a trend to repeat one's argument about this proposed extension
in various mailing lists/wiki pages/etc., so let's repeat myself, too... :-]
2016-07-07 19:44 GMT+02:00 Carter Schonwald
the fact that its perilously close to looking like *1 typo* away from a parser error about record syntax makes me *-1000* now [...]
-1000 for exactly the same reason, and more: If you look at the "Block as a LHS" section on the wiki, things get insame IMHO: do f &&& g x should mean "(f &&& g) x"? It's probably 99% more likely that somebody didn't get the indentation right for the "do". And what about: foobar do f &&& g x Should the x now be an argument of foobar (as it is currently) or the "do"? If it is not an argument of the "do", suddenly things get very context-dependent. Computers are good at handling context-dependent things, humans are quite bad at it. Taking one step back: I think a lot of the discussion is based on the false assumption that "something can be parsed in an unambiguous way by some more or less random parsing technology" means "it can easily be parsed by a human". This is a fundamental misconception, otherwise reading programs in Brainfuck or Whitespace would be easy, too. In our case at hand, visually determining what is an argument of a function in a quick way is *supported* by some (perhaps) redundant syntactic stuff. That's exactly the reason why the current record syntax is a big mistake: Normally, an argument is beginning after a whitespace (unless there are other syntactic clues like '$', '(', etc.), but foo bar { baz = blah } runs against this intuition and one has to mentally backtrack. The proposal at hand would enshrine this kind of broken syntax in more places. As has already been said in another thread, the goal of language design is not to make writing correct programs easier (by allowing more and more syntax), but to make writing wrong programs harder. And a note about counting votes: I think normal democrating voting procedures simply don't apply here. Even if e.g. 80% of the voters find something OK while the other 20% find it confusing, the majority vote doesn't make the confusion of a fifth of the people go away. For a change like this, I would expect near unanimous consent, but I think we are very, very far away from that...