On Thu, 2006-02-02 at 11:38 +0100, John Hughes wrote:
For the last few days, my mail-box has been full of mail about the M-R, lazy pattern matching, n+k patterns, comment syntax--it's just like the good old days! And that worries me.
Each of these topics is a snake pit--a tricky area of language design, with many alternative possibilities and no clear winner. As such, they make great discussion topics--if you want to start a heated argument, just propose a change to one of these (mea culpa)! We've also been discussing most of them for sixteen years. (snip)
I hope that we can avoid rehashing discussion where possible. That means going out and looking for objective information and putting it on the wiki for everyone to see. That means making ourselves aware (if we aren't already) of past discussions. I hope that those who were around "in the good old days" will consistently interrupt threads with "we had this discussion on march 10th 1994 and here's what we came up with. I put the summary up on the wiki along with links to two papers". That's everyone's job, but especially the committee :) peace, isaac