[gambit-list] Thinking of changing pp

Derek Peschel dpeschel at eskimo.com
Sun Jun 1 16:05:38 EDT 2008


On Sun, Jun 01, 2008 at 12:21:34PM -0400, Marc Feeley wrote:
> What do you think?

Other people have made some interesting points.  The one about
standardization is worth repeating.

You may want to look at it from the users' point of view.  I sometimes
see this kind of feature which has already been decided, and which I
can't change.

QuickBasic's and Python's "print" statements take a variable number of
items and automatically put spaces between the printouts of the items.
Then how to remove them?  (Usually by putting everything in one argument,
or using another form of print.)  But if the print statement never
inserts anything, then adding spaces (or anything else) to the arguments
requires no drastic transformations.

I'm not just making an analogy.  That little example touches on some
interesting issues in language design.

>From your own point of view as a language designer, have you thought of
how to combine the existing output-port syntax with the new syntax?

Or as a library and IDE designer, have you thought about your label
feature as the beginning of an object inspector?

-- Derek



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