Peter Douglass <peterd@availant.com> writes:
Julian Assange wrote (Dec 28, 2000):
This is why all non S-exp like lanaguage are doomed to progressive syntactic cancer as the useful parts of operator name space and syntax space become progressively polluted and mutated by one fad after another.
Could you expand on this? I would think that all languages have identifies that, through common usage become standardized, and that this meaning becomes a de-facto part of the language. Do you feel that this has not happened in Lisp/Scheme?
The identifier space in lisp/scheme has wide tree depth and is (essentially) lexically scoped. Infix operator identifiers in other languages are the antithesis of this. It could be argued, both fairly and unfairly, that the verbosity of S-exp bracketing leaves short identifiers less desirable than they otherwise would be, however tree-width arguments remain. Polution of syntax space is a more difficult problem. As new syntactic axioms are intruded, they should remain consistant with the existing syntax elements. This poses ever increasing restraint on the evolution of the language. New syntax elements appear less intuitive and more arbitary in an attempt to fit in with the morass of ever increasing restraints. If these restraints are not honnored, the language becomes inconsistant. Eventually the language is guarenteed to become either inconsistant or moribund as the number of interactions between language elements overwhelms a language designers attempts understand them. The same is even more true of language semantics. The trouble lays in finding initial axioms which can cleave large sections of future concept space between them. -- Julian Assange |If you want to build a ship, don't drum up people |together to collect wood or assign them tasks and proff@iq.org |work, but rather teach them to long for the endless proff@gnu.ai.mit.edu |immensity of the sea. -- Antoine de Saint Exupery