Re: Syntactic sugar for function parameters

[Bret Victor <bret@...>]

Paul Hudson <phudson <at> pobox.com> writes:

> > Maybe it's time to introduce a space operator.
> 
> Why not? There's a classic C++ proposal along the same lines...
> http://public.research.att.com/~bs/whitespace98.pdf

What's truly funny is that Fortress, Guy Steele's new language,
actually has an honest-to-goodness whitespace operator:

  opr juxtaposition (m,n) = m.times(n)
  
Even funnier -- Stroustrup jokes about limiting all identifiers
to a single character, but allowing for extended character sets,
so you can use a little picture of a telephone to represent the
"phone" object.  Sure enough, in his talks, Guy Steele says 
something like, "Because C++ was limited to ASCII, it had to
do nonsensical operator overloading, such as using << for I/O.
But because we have all of Unicode available to us, we can
define more meaningful operators.  We can define an I/O operator
with the Unicode symbol for a little picture of a printer."