On 2007-11-29, Clifford Beshers
Jeremy Shaw and I had a bunch of conversations about this kind of thing, almost always ending with Jeremy citing this story. I found it at: http://www.oreillynet.com/xml/blog/2002/11/whats_wrong_with_rdf.html
<famous-anecdote>Stuart Feldman, the Bell Labs guy who invented "make", woke
up one morning a few weeks after he'd released it, and realized that the syntax basically sucked - all those tabs and colons and weird continuation rules. He started working on something better and was shot down because someone said "Stuart, there are *dozens* of people using this, it's too late to change it."</famous-anecdote>
Please publish your alternative implementation in a blog or in a package on Haskell. Think of all the children that will be spared in the future.
This is also said to be why C's precedence rules for logical operators aren't quite right. We're still at the stage where this is fixable. -- Aaron Denney -><-