Re: Why no numbers allowed in variables?

[David Kastrup]

David Kastrup <address@hidden> writes:

> Thomas Morley <address@hidden> writes:
>
>> It was an observation, not a proposal.
>> Speaking only for myself, I can perfectly life without the
>> comma-syntax in definitions and their calls.
>
> It feels weird in definitions.  Don't remember whether there was some
> original rationale for it (like consistency, possibly connected with
> convenience in reusing parser rules).

Ah, the way "property_path" is defined via "symbol_list_rev" and symbol
lists also in function arguments are defined as being able to contain
either '.' or ',' means that even if one forces the first separator to
be a '.', the following separators are hard to avoid being also
permissable as ','.

So navigating around that inconsistency is pretty ugly: it will
sometimes work and sometimes not.  But maybe definition and call of
those kind of separated variables should at least be identical and
consequently require a first dot even if for technical reasons the
following separators may happen to admit commata.

-- 
David Kastrup