Re: proposed parser changes

[Dupuis]

John W. Eaton wrote:
> 
> 
> 
> I resisted this kind of change in the past because I didn't like the
> following behavior of Matlab:
> 
> Given a function foo, the expression
> 
>   foo -1
> [...]
> 
> Comments?
> 

Syntactic sugar. Sugar is bad for theeth. 
Just to avoid typing two parens, this introduce a lot of uncertainties, and
traps for the unwary.
I learned to program in Fortran, and to me:
foo is a variable
foo(-1) is a call to the function foo, with argument -1
foo() -1 is a computation using the output arg of function foo, called
without input args.
The rest is unneeded complexity. Have a look at 'perldoc perlfunc'. Now
figure out why "print 1+2+4" prints 7, and "print (1+2) + 4" prints 3 !

OTOH, I worked a lot with R recently, and I like their paradigm:
foo is a variable (scalar, vector, matrix, ...)
foo[something] is a slice, that is, part of a vector, matrix
foo[, 2] is the second column of matrix foo
foo() is a function call

the point is that the operator to access submatrices, "[", is different from
he one used for functions calls, "(". The disambiguation is total, but I
guess such change would break a lot of code in Octave.

Regards

Pascal
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