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1 point by akkartik 4873 days ago | link | parent

I think I'm ok with us as a community saying "this version of arc treats ? as ssyntax" without necessarily having any code to do so :) expand-ssyntax for ? is the identity until we come up with a use for it. "Use ? as a variable at your own risk."

(Probably a strawman.) What I don't want is to start reserving tokens or characters 'for later use' and enforcing that they can't be variables and so on. Common Lisp does this and it's stupid. Did you know you can't declare a function called type even though it doesn't do anything, hasn't done anything for the past 15 years? What a colossal waste of a great token! https://github.com/akkartik/wart/blob/master/009core.lisp#L1

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You've got what I'm saying completely backwards.

Ah yes, I did. You said &o is ok.

It does raise the question of the right way to setup ssyntax. Either we're making changes to expand-ssyntax everytime we want a special case to turn off ssyntax expansion or we're saying "leave & as is when it begins or ends a symbol."

But then you could argue that &o is still impinging on a potential variable name. It's starting to feel like arguing about angels and pinheads; why is it ok to pun + and & and : so they do different things in different contexts, but not use ? because of some speculative fear of potentially punning variable names?



1 point by rocketnia 4873 days ago | link

Those are all questions I worry about. ^_^ I'm really itching to post about Penknife's syntax, since I think it does a good job of dissolving these issues.

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1 point by evanrmurphy 4873 days ago | link

> I'm really itching to post about Penknife's syntax, since I think it does a good job of dissolving these issues.

I'd like to know more about this.

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1 point by rocketnia 4873 days ago | link

Ye sorta receive. ^_^ http://arclanguage.org/item?id=13071

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