From ruthc@ivimey.org Sun Oct 31 15:49:06 2004 From: Ruth Ivimey-Cook To: occam-com@ukc.ac.uk Date: Mon, 18 Dec 2000 23:49:09 +0000 Subject: Re: New language syntax MIME-Version: 1.0 Message-ID: <4.3.2.7.0.20001218234311.00b3e740@mailhost.ivimey.org> At 21:33 18/12/00 +0000, you wrote:
Some things are complex and need a lot of code. occam encourages a
simple sparse - and thus elegant - style. If code is long, one's
attention is drawn to that. If it is unavoidable, start folding
heavily, if only to make it understandable. Dense impenetrable code is
encouraged by C and friends; unfortunately there are still people who
think it macho to write such stuff. Despite officially deprecating such
things.


I know many people at ARM who hate adding an extra blank line to C programs, even when that goes against the coding standards, because they like having whole algorithms onscreen at a time. I would not underestimate the number of people who like dense code, even though us poor mortals have trouble maintain it sometimes :-)

Occam is only bad in a few places: in some ways the indenting style saves space. Mostly it's the requirememt for TRUE/SKIP, and sometimes the rather rigid line-break rules, that cause irritations.

Would it be possible to create an occam that had the simple line-break rule:

You can break lines at any position that whitespace is valid. The remnant must be indented further than the maximum indentation at that point.

i.e.

VAL x IS<newline>
<4spacesc>y:


Or am I forgetting something (quite likely)?

Ruth