Re: "decent" editors (was: line ending summary: the "Breg Hudther ton Proposal")

On Thu, Dec 13, 2001 at 08:27:30PM -0800, Billy Tanksley wrote:
> From: Greg Stein [mailto:gstein@lyra.org]
>...
> >It is possible for the computer to know exactly what was
> >meant, and to do so
> >unambiguously. "intelligence" would seem to imply ambiguity,
> >and in that case: I would *highly* agree with you.
>
> How? We've already covered a billion different cases here. There's no way

I was talking generally. For the specific case of newlines: yah... it is
always ambiguous -- the computer will never "know" what you want.

>...
> Surely you agree that even if such problems were common,
> line-ending-conversion isn't one of them; we don't "just know" what to do.

Absolutely agree.

> Of course, problems like that are far from common. I'm thinking of one
> right now: Python's use of ":" to signal the end of an if statement (not
> needed because only one expression can go in an if statement, so ":" is the
> only thing that will fit). You can read the comp.lang.python archives to
> see why the Python developers keep that unneeded syntax in the language --
> they have several positive arguments for it.

That colon is necessary. Consider the following code:

    if 5 == x : (foo(1))

Without the colon:

    if 5 == x (foo(1))

That has a very different meaning :-)

But your first point "far from common" is quite true. Only your example was
off a bit :-)

Cheers,
-g

-- 
Greg Stein, http://www.lyra.org/
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