I'm going to agree with Ned again because, uh, well, I like what's in the
draft. I'll go with whatever consensus is, of course.
On Tue, 29 Apr 1997, Ned Freed wrote:
(1) Comments
"--" becomes problematic the minute you add arithmetic operators to the
language. Let's not make Ada's mistake here, OK?
I'm not wild about "#" but the only alternative I see is "!", which might
interfere with future operator extensions. So "#" really seems like the best
choice for now.
I like this argument. of course, I never used AppleScript and spend time
writing shell scripts.
The grammar seems to require a trailing ";" after every command
(including an endif). I'm starting to think it would be better to simply
have CRLF terminate a command as many of your examples do (and use "\"
CRLF to fold a line).
I don't like this change either -- we're making the mistake Praxis (and
others)
made here.
I'm not familiar with Praxis.
The more I think about this change, the less I like it.
I finally figured out why I dislike the use of SMTP-style message text: It is
because it makes the grammar context-sensitive: "message" (or "text:") has to
kick the lexer into a special state. I think this is fairly problematic
behavior at best. What happens when we want to extend the language by adding
some other construct that requires message text as an argument.
I think we really need to bite the bullet here and go back to some sort of
consistent quoting scheme. I'd recommend using C style string constants,
possibly with the extension of alloing a string to cross line boundaries.
I agree with this; it'll make indentation prettier, but I can see it as
being a problem. I opted for SMTP strings in part because mail and some
similar programs cope with them; while this is an awkward solution, it makes
the parser easier. But if the theory is that novices won't write many
scripts, I can cope with C-style strings. (The "reply" feature is one
that probably should be kind of difficult to use.) If we don't use
backslashes above, we can use backslashes here, although I'm partial to
ANSI C-style string composition ("this is one" " long string").
--
Tim Showalter
tjs(_at_)andrew(_dot_)cmu(_dot_)edu