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Re: Does my ideal language exist?

On Fri, 23 Jun 2000, Bruce Hoult wrote:
> In article <39500e18@news.sentex.net>, hs@inferno.nirvananet (Hartmann 
> Schaffer) wrote:
> 
> > In article <394EB8F3.E4D35698@hotdispatch.com>,
> > 	"Carl L. Gay" <sigue@hotdispatch.com> writes:
> > > ...
> > > Though Dylan was fairly heavily influenced by Common Lisp, its designers
> > > decided to use an infix syntax, presumably to be more attractive to
> > > people coming from languages like C++.  Your mileage may vary.
> > 
> > unless memory deceives me, the original plan was to provide both lisp
> > and c like syntax ...  i don't remember why (or if) the
> > lisplike syntax was officially dropped.
> 
> I guess it just fell into disuse.  The option was there to placate some 
> of the LISP guys, who didn't want to change, but in practice they seem 
> to have adapted to the infix syntax.
> 
> The only remaining reason for a LISP-like syntax is to make some kinds 
> of program manipulation tools simpler, but that's really not a big 
> problem once there is a decent open-source parser (or even grammar) for 
> the infix language (which there is).

I've heard the suggestion that a language which had multiple concrete
syntaxes but one abstract syntax could be really interesting, specially if
you had automated tools to go between surface syntaxes via the abstract
one.  The tricky bit (well okay, an *extra* tricky bit ;-) in Dylan would
be that you'd have to translate macros for each concrete syntax, probably
by hand.  But if you had it working, different people could edit the same
code with different syntaxes :-)

Hugh