[mercury-users] Empty conjuncts?

[Peter Hawkins]

Ralph Becket wrote:

>Peter Hawkins, Friday, 22 July 2005:
>  
>
>>Hi...
>>
>>Would it be possible to relax mercury's syntax a little, and allow empty 
>>elements in conjunctions? In other words, this should be valid:
>>    
>>
>
>I'd vote against that change, aesthetically speaking.  Honestly, do you
>really spend that much time fixing comma bugs?
>  
>
It's not so much time, rather annoyance. It's just about guaranteed that 
every time I build a newly edited mercury program I'll find a comma bug. 
Looking at the thread Mark posted it seems I'm not alone. I think 
allowing empty conjuncts makes semantic sense, and is unlikely to break 
anything. I kind of like the fact that ';' is a valid statement in C, 
for example.

The semicolon in C doesn't annoy me because it's consistent (every line 
of procedural body code needs one, modulo statements that you split 
across multiple lines like 'if' and 'for'). In mercury, whether a line 
of code needs a comma, period, or nothing at all depends on other lines. 
This constantly bites me when I remove or add lines of code, and forces 
me to endure another compile cycle to fix it.

=)
Peter
--------------------------------------------------------------------------
mercury-users mailing list
post:  mercury-users at cs.mu.oz.au
administrative address: owner-mercury-users at cs.mu.oz.au
unsubscribe: Address: mercury-users-request at cs.mu.oz.au Message: unsubscribe
subscribe:   Address: mercury-users-request at cs.mu.oz.au Message: subscribe
--------------------------------------------------------------------------