Re: Request for clarification on reserved names

[steve donovan <steve.j.donovan@...>]

On Fri, Apr 25, 2014 at 12:20 PM, Coroutines <coroutines@gmail.com> wrote:
> I know you to be a very smart/clever guy but I want to shake my head
> when it feels like you are against incorporating any concept that may
> be best known from another language.

Believe me, I used to be like you, until I spent several years
maintaining bad C++ codebases ;)

I've always longed for a short-lambda syntax  (either |x| x^2 or
\x(x^2), not fussy) but that was a non-starter.  There were strong
opinions, and now I can see some of the point - you get intense little
expressions like '|| fun()' and have to map them mentally to closure
construction.  Lua is not so afraid of verbosity as other languages.
and generally we avoid the compressed-notation problem that way.

But this is not about concepts, but notation.

I mean, this involves rewriting the lexer, just so that a few people
can say 't.end'?

Having punctuation in identifiers seems a good idea but then everyone
goes mad and you have Perl.

Besides, there are better things to do with ?  - 'safe navigation'
operator: a?.b?.c