Can you walk me through how this simplifies the grammar etc in concrete compare contrast or what the diffs between the grammar and associated engineering would be?
I don't see how it simplifies the grammar, but I could be a bit obtuse.
That aside, I'm also a bit fuzzy on the other claim, that this change will simplify post parsing engineering,
> ambiguity is bad for humans, not just parsers.
This is not ambiguous. It’s removing the need for a redundant set of
parentheses, whichever way you slice it. Of course, some redundancy is
useful for readability (look at natural language), but you should
really be explicit if you’re arguing from that position.
> perhaps most damningly,
>>
>>
>> f do{ x } do { y }
>
>
> is just reallly really weird/confusing to me
By “weird”, do you mean anything other than “I don’t understand it,
and I blame it”? Can you give an example of how you might misparse it,
as a human reader?
>> It's harder to read than the alternative.
>>
>> Creating a language extension to get rid of a single character is overkill
>> and unnecessary.
It’s only a language extension for backward compatibility. It’s really
fixing a bug in the grammar.
> I'm all in favor of doing engineering work to *improve*
> our parser error messages and suggestions, but not stuff that complicates
> parsing for humans as well as machines
This would be a simplification of the parser if the bug hadn’t been
standardised originally.