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Discussion on: Functional, Verbose, Sensical: A Programming Language Proposal

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megazear7 profile image
megazear7

"from" would be a reserved word and so couldn't be used in an identifier. However it is a good point as it is a common word and would be limiting. Maybe using a symbol such as "<-" for the same purpose?

the users age <- command line arguments

However that kind of harms the original intent of making the code read like sentences. The manual syntax highlighting that i did here helped. The fact that as programmers we read code better when identifiers have no spaces is a bit of an artifact of age old decisions that have become almost universal. It's probably best to stay the course as far as identifiers go just because of the uniqueness cost to breaking that trend, however I thought it would be interesting to see what it would like.

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itr13 profile image
Mikael Klages

Hmm, but even without the bias I think it would be harder to separate variables from reserved words like this, but who knows.

I think fortran ignores all whitespace, so maybe it's possibel to find wisdom in what fortran developers have said. Though that would have other potential readability issues since "GO TO" would equal "GOTO" and so on.