Timeline for Are there good reasons to minimize the number of keywords in a language?
Current License: CC BY-SA 4.0
8 events
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| Jul 24, 2023 at 9:23 | history | edited | kaya3 | CC BY-SA 4.0 |
deleted 19 characters in body
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| Jul 11, 2023 at 15:19 | comment | added | CoffeeTableEspresso | Having to figure out what a keyword means by context alone (i.e. when the keyword is overloaded for multiple things) probably complicates the compiler much more than just having an extra keyword. | |
| Jul 11, 2023 at 15:18 | comment | added | CoffeeTableEspresso | Even if you do a linear search to lookup keywords, it won't really matter for performance. Most languages have dozens (or a few hundred in large cases) of keywords... | |
| Jul 5, 2023 at 12:50 | comment | added | kaya3 | @MatthieuM. Well, if you will choose to have an ambiguous grammar then you're going to have problems when you have to parse it. That's not surprising, but many languages overload keywords without making their grammar ambiguous. | |
| Jul 5, 2023 at 12:49 | comment | added | Matthieu M. |
In this specific case, yes. Ask C++ about using <> to delimit template parameter lists though...
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| Jul 5, 2023 at 12:38 | comment | added | kaya3 |
@MatthieuM. The context is generally already known by the parser, implicitly based on the control-flow. For example when parseExpr sees an if keyword it can only be an if expression, whereas if parseStmt sees the same keyword it can only be an if statement.
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| Jul 5, 2023 at 12:32 | comment | added | Matthieu M. | If anything, I would argue that overloading a keyword makes the job of the subsequent passes more complicated, as the exact meaning now depends on the context which must be looked up... | |
| Jul 4, 2023 at 13:03 | history | answered | kaya3 | CC BY-SA 4.0 |