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Taylor R. Campbell wrote:
foo: bar baz: quux zot: mumble In the last one I find it hard to tell where one pair ends and the next one begins. On the other hand, with a prefix, the delimitation of the pairs is very clear: :foo bar :baz quux :zot mumble
An alternative worth considering is an infix syntax. For example:
(button color="red" font="Helvetica")
I.e. the syntax is:
<identifier>=<expression>
This would be translated by the reader into (say):
(make-association '<identifier> <expression>)
[This is similar to John Cowan's suggestion. However,
I'm not sure I want to specify association lists, since
I think a separate type is preferable.]
This is of course familiar from XML and HTML.
Unfortunately, this syntax does conflict with historical
<identifier> syntax in certain presumably-very-rare cases.
That might be acceptable or not. If not, we could find
some other syntax, but there is a tradeoff between nice
syntax and 100% compatibility. Some ideas:
[color]"red"
{color}="red"
#{color}"red"
We could also have the RHS be a quasi-quoted <datum> rather than
<expression>:
(button color=red font=Helvectica)
You'd use comma (unquote) to evaluate an expression:
(button color=,current-color font=,(select-font))
--
--Per Bothner
per@bothner.com http://per.bothner.com/