> You better ask Don that one <wink>. It's precisely because of these
> confusions that I prefer the WYSIWYG approach (and have already owned up
> to it being ugly -- it's a tradeoff).
The WYSIGYG approach is fine by me. I just thought that an approach
that went along with Python's use of indentation would be better.
Sure there are a lot of problems that need to be solve inorder to do
this right... if it was easy I would have just implemented it:)
> Donald was appalled that I threw variable-substitution into the pot, but
> that was fresh on mind because last week I wrote a multi-hundred line
> script that spit out some assembly code (as part of prototyping a
> compiler optimization). The _pleasant_ data-structuring methods in Perl4
> weren't quite up to the task, so I really wanted to use Python. But it
> contains lots of little output sections that (now that it's done) look
> like this:
I think appalled is a wee bit of an overstatement. I too like the
idea of variable subsitution, but just not as part of the language
proper. Adding it to the language would require a vast amount of
change to the tokenizer, parser, and code generator. What I was
suggesting would be a relatively simple change to just the tokenizer.
In fact, the reason I want multi-line strings is so that I can parse
the strings and perform the substitutions myself. But that is another
story.
Aside from the sementic problems, Guido pointed out a pratical
problem. Namly the tokenizer's fascination with single lines of
input. I think that this could be fix fairly easily though (I have a
plan).
--Don
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