[mercury-users] Empty conjuncts?

[Mark Brown]

On 22-Jul-2005, Peter Hawkins <peter at hawkins.emu.id.au> wrote:
> Would it be possible to relax mercury's syntax a little, and allow empty 
> elements in conjunctions?

...

> This would make my life much easier since I spend too much time 
> searching for superfluous commas in Mercury code. This often annoys me 
> when I have deleted a line at the end of an if-then-else or disjunct and 
> forgotten to remove the comma on the end of the previous line.

A few years back there was another proposal to address this editing issue.
It was to allow "juxtaposition" to be interpreted as ','/2, so in
effect making commas optional in conjunctions (and also possibly in data
terms and argument lists).  You can see a discussion on this in the
mailing list archives at:

http://www.cs.mu.oz.au/research/mercury/mailing-lists/mercury-developers/mercury-developers.0111/0142.html

under the subject "Commas considered optional".

The juxtaposition proposal is better on aesthetic grounds than empty
conjuncts, IMHO.  But also see later in the thread for some of the
negatives of allowing juxtaposition.

Cheers,
Mark.

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