On Sat, Mar 22, 2014 at 10:48:44AM -0700, Walter Bright wrote:
> On 3/21/2014 7:08 PM, H. S. Teoh wrote:
> >Perhaps we should be talking about how more people can make github contributions instead. ;-)
> 
> Anyone can create a bugzilla account and/or a github account and get started contributing. Nobody's permission is required.

I know that. :) I was alluding to motivating more forumites to participate.


T

-- 
Без труда не выловишь и рыбку из пруда.

On 03/22/14 11:14, Brian Rogoff wrote:
[snip]
> C++ has a much nastier syntax than D (IMO of course :-) but the SPECS
> proposal for a resyntaxed C++ never caught on.

Brian, could you provide a link for this proposal?
I'd appreciate it.

-regards,
Larry

On 21 March 2014 18:55, Frustrated <Frustrated@nowhere.com> wrote:
> On Friday, 21 March 2014 at 18:47:49 UTC, Pedro Larroy wrote:
>>
>> Hi
>>
>> As a newcomer to D, I wonder, how difficult would be and would it be welcome by the D community to have D's syntax with significant whitespace and without brackets more like python?
>>
>>
>> Thanks.
>
>
> Why not just learn the correct syntax instead of perpetuating ignorance? Python syntax is not modern. COBOL just needs to go away...

http://www.coboloncogs.org/INDEX.HTM

On Saturday, 22 March 2014 at 18:08:01 UTC, evansl wrote:
> On 03/22/14 11:14, Brian Rogoff wrote:
> [snip]
>> C++ has a much nastier syntax than D (IMO of course :-) but the SPECS
>> proposal for a resyntaxed C++ never caught on.
>
> Brian, could you provide a link for this proposal?
> I'd appreciate it.
>
> -regards,
> Larry

http://www.csse.monash.edu.au/~damian/papers/HTML/ModestProposal.html

I think there is an expanded version of this report too, but this gives you the flavor. Note that it is based on a fairly old version of C++. I prefer the D !() for templates to their <[]>, but I prefer their declaration and pointer syntax.

I don't think D's current syntax is really a problem. Well, there are some things that vex me a bit, like the multiple "alias this" and also the "is" syntax. Even though I prefer indentation sensitive syntax to C style syntax, if there were a front end for D that used an alternative syntax I would not use it. I suspect that I'm hardly unique in that either.

On Saturday, 22 March 2014 at 17:54:16 UTC, Russel Winder wrote:
> like "end to end" the same language. Many are asking about server-side Dart as well as client-side Dart in the browser.

Yes, a CLI/server Dart VM exists that is suitable for a http server. The advantage of client/server code sharing is obvious when you write web-apps, but I am a bit weary of using dynamic languages on web servers since runtime errors can be nasty. I personally would like to see a Dart version with a much stricter type system, but I think the Dart library is just about right for web development and the language itself is pretty well rounded and pragmatic (but nothing spectacular).

> IPython is an excellent tool for creating documents that incorporate executable Python as an integral component. It is
> "literate  Python programming". However it is only a good tool
> if the end result is a document to be read and shared.

Hm, I use it for all kinds of small scale experiments/testing, which usually just involves getting those 1-4 lines of python code right (array transformations, regexps etc). I guess it depends on what you use Python for.

> I think the Python IDE such as Wing IDE,
> PyCharm, actually do the REPL and editor model better.

They probably are, but my point was more that a REPL/interpreter friendly syntax is not the same as a write/compile friendly syntax.

(I am currently using Eclipse with PyDev and am a bit reluctant to use even more IDEs, but I see that PyCharm has a new free edition that I probably should check out. Thanks for the tip!)

Ola.

On Saturday, 22 March 2014 at 16:28:11 UTC, Paulo Pinto wrote:
> When F# was still in beta, it had OCaml syntax as default with a significant whitespace mode that could be turned on with a compiler directive "#light on".
>
> While asking the embryonic F# community which mode should be the default.
>
> The significant whitespace mode won and became the default, with the
> OCaml mode being the optional one.

That's not too hard to believe. I like OCaml a lot but its syntax is not its best feature. The OCaml preprocessor (CamlP4) had an improved syntax called Revised as one of its applications. As I recall, Gerard Huet (who publicized 'the zipper') used a subset of Revised he called Pidgin ML in his publications. They looked a lot nicer than regular OCaml.

I've never written any F#, since I live in the world of Unix, and never visit Windows. It looks like it has some interesting improvements over OCaml (let!, async stuff, LINQ, some overloading, ...) but has a weak module system compared to OCaml.

Brian Rogoff:

> I like OCaml a lot but its syntax is not its best feature.

See also:
http://people.csail.mit.edu/mikelin/ocaml+twt/

Bye,
bearophile

On Saturday, 22 March 2014 at 17:28:16 UTC, Andrei Alexandrescu wrote:
> On 3/22/14, 9:19 AM, MattCoder wrote:
>> On Saturday, 22 March 2014 at 01:22:14 UTC, Andrei Alexandrescu
>> wrote:
>>> ...Given D's compilation speed, that can be achieved as a dialect
>>> without much aggravation by using a preprocessor.
>>>
>>> In fact I considered writing such a preprocessor as a running example...
>>
>> Please someone could show a little example of the quote above? I
>> mean it would act like C preprocessor or in D it has another
>> meaning?
>
> As simple as it gets. The program would translate files with extension ".wsd" into files with extension ".d" and run dmd (or rdmd) transparently. Appropriate handling of file timestamps etc. would complete a nice utility. You'd use it like
>
> wsd myscript.wsd
>
> which under the hood would create (if necessary) myscript.d and then exec rdmd on it.
>
>
> Andrei

After far too many hours on a plane today, I ended up building this[1]. This is very much a proof of concept, and not production ready in the slightest.

I should point out that the extensibility and maintainability of this is roughly equivalent to that of a potato, but it serves its purpose decently well.

[1] https://github.com/ColdenCullen/wsd

Colden Cullen:

> [1] https://github.com/ColdenCullen/wsd

Looks like a good start. I could even use that syntax in some cases :-) (like some script-like programs).

Using just an indent to define a sub-block seems a little too much brittle. So perhaps a specific keyword or symbol could be be used.

In Python there is also the keyword "pass" that could be useful here.

It could also be useful some way to switch back to normal D syntax inside a file, to solve some problem (like to simplify mixins creation).

Bye,
bearophile

On Friday, 21 March 2014 at 18:47:49 UTC, Pedro Larroy wrote:
> Hi
>
> As a newcomer to D, I wonder, how difficult would be and would it be welcome by the D community to have D's syntax with significant whitespace and without brackets more like python?
>
>
> Thanks.

It's interesting to see this being discussed, as somebody recently created a Go-like language with Pythonic syntax that compiles to Go. The Go community however didn't appear to be particularly interested in it: https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/golang-nuts/-STRYo2Cc0g