Re: Lightweight syntax: a dissident view

[Pierre-Yves Gérardy <pygy79@...>]

On Thu, Nov 25, 2010 at 11:19, Philippe Lhoste <PhiLho@gmx.net> wrote:
> Typing on French keyboards, I feel that, although all the programming keys
> ~#{[|`\@]} must use a special gymnastics (AltGr + upper row (number) key). `
> and ~ are worse as they are dead keys (on Windows) so need an extra space to
> make them appear.

On the Mac Belgian keyboard, they []|\ require a three keys chord
(Alt+Shift), and ~ is a dead key, as is ^, but @ and # are easier to
type than on Windows.
I'm thinking of switching to blind US-QWERTY  like Wim Langers.

> When I see Luiz' example of \x,y,z(x+(x-2)*g(x,y,z-2*(x+y))-y*z)
> I have some hard time to see it as a function definition with parameters...

It is actually inspired by the mathematical notation for lambda
calculus as defined by Church[1], adapted to ASCII and the Lua
grammar.

λxyf.f x y ==> \x,y,f ( f(x,y) )
&x,y,f( f(x,y) ) is also visually close to λ but it is also
semantically loaded and would conflict with a patch implementing a '&'
and '|' as infix operator for boolean arithmetic.

This leaves us with '@', '$' and '\'. The first two are Perlish. The
last one is a bit shallow, visually. There no obvious candidate...

One more candidate:

    `do` `[` args `]` chunk `end`

with a short return token wouldn't be too bad. It looks more like the
usual Lua syntax.

-- Pierre-Yves

1. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lambda_calculus