Re: [NOISE] Curly braces [was Re: Curl]

[Bruce Lewis <address@hidden>]

What do people use in English to embed code within text?  Let's look at
what jrm wrote:

>Subject: Re: [NOISE] Curly braces [was Re: Curl]

Here, the text of the subject line is "Curly braces".  "NOISE" and "was
Re: Curl" are code.  They don't change the text; I guess they're
executed for side effect.

> "Christopher Barber" <cbarber@curl.com> writes:
> > [Curl's use of curly braces] is not gratuitous.  Curly braces were

Now, what part of this is literal text, and what part is code that we
must evaluate, retrieving data from some persistent store in order to
get the full text of what C. Barber wrote?

[(define shameless-plug-and-teaser ]

In BRL, I use square brackets to separate text and code, as in English.
By leaving parens with their previous meaning, code can be embedded
within text within code within text.  Come to my Dec 14 talk at MIT and
I'll show that this is something non-programmers want to do.

I'll also show how "code embedded within text" is a needlessly
complicated mental model of what BRL and similar systems do.

 http://www.ai.mit.edu/projects/dynlangs/Talks/brl.htm

[)]


-- 
<brlewis@[(if (brl-related? message)    ; Bruce R. Lewis
              "users.sourceforge.net"   ; http://brl.sourceforge.net/
              "alum.mit.edu")]>