Limber separators

[Jon Fairbairn]

Alexander Berntsen
<alexander at plaimi.net> writes:
> [ Foo
> , Bar
> , Fu
> , Baz ]
>
> It is impossible to remove values Foo or Baz with a one line diff. It
> is additionally impossible to reasonably add a new value to the top or
> bottom of the list.

I’m not on the committee either, but here’s my three haporth.

Something that is missing from this type of discussion is any
reference to design rules, agreement on which should be made
before any suggestion like this.

The one this violates is “never make language design decisions
to work around deficiencies in tools” The problem is that diff
does its work in ignorance of the syntax and consequently
produces poor results.

The other observation I want to make is that the object of
programming language design is not to make writing programmes
(or changing) easier. It is to make writing incorrect programmes
(especially programmes that look right but are not) harder. We
have to ask whether making a “one line diff” do this is actually
productive. Having a large Hamming distance between
syntactically valid programmes is an advantage.

-- 
Jón Fairbairn                                 Jon.Fairbairn at cl.cam.ac.uk