Re: [Gnu-arch-users] Re: new language, arch, furth, etc.

[Andrew Suffield]

On Wed, Jul 21, 2004 at 11:58:12AM +0000, Mikhael Goikhman wrote:
> I strongly agree that significant whitespace is a burden in programming.
> (One should be able to freely copy/embed any program part with no change.
> One should be able to write any program in one line and pass it as an
> argument to the command line interpreter.)

This is an unfortunately common belief, but inaccurate, and encouraged
by the atrocious abuses of whitespace found in languages like python.

Get your head around how the Haskell layout rule[0] works, if you
can. That's the right approach. I'm kinda planning on coming up with a
variant of the layout rule for furth. Personally I can't stand reading
the lisp style, and there is no reason why I should, since there are
existing two-way transformations.

Haskell code *really* looks like C, with strict bracing and line
termination. But by utilising the layout rule you can skip them -
they'll be implicitly inserted according to the indentation. Whenever
it's inconvinient, you just throw in braces and semicolons. To paste
in a block of code, you can just throw a pair of braces around it.

[0] http://haskell.org/onlinereport/syntax-iso.html#layout but the
    important part is defined as a Haskell program, and is
    subtle. It's *really* clever in how it works but it will attempt
    to eat your brain. I would have written it in a more simple
    fashion.

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