On Tue, Apr 8, 2008 at 4:46 AM, Paul Keir
I have noticed something interesting though. If I simply omit the "a" from "opLetter", the problem is gone. In fact, leaving "opStart", "opLetter", and "reservedOpNames" all empty works fine too.
That makes sense. opLetter is there to support "user-defined" operators, as many languages allow two distinct classes of identifiers - one which looks like variables and one which looks like symbolic operators. If you don't want to allow user-defined operators which contain "a", so that ":a:", a reserved keyword, is the only valid identifier which contains both "a" and another member of opLetter, you should be OK leaving "a" off of the list of opLetters. Indeed, you shouldn't actually need to specify ":a:" in reservedOpNames either, since "reservedOp" doesn't check that list, and the "operator" parser will already reject ":a:" because it contains a non-opLetter. Though, for sanity you might leave it there anyway. At least, I think so. --Chris