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by chc 5653 days ago
Your complaint is that you can't parse the code with 100% certainty without some basic knowledge of the language? That hardly seems like a complaint at all. The same is true of any language that isn't explicitly identical to one you already know.
1 comments
mattmanser 5653 days ago
No, his complaint is that you can't parse the code without knowing all the keywords in the language.

He wrote every single keyword == all the keywords.

That's not basic knowledge of a language.

Maybe I'm odd, but when I start on a new language I don't learn all the syntax first, I usually I start mucking around with variable declaration, iterators, simple stuff like that just to get a feel of it. I'm guessing it's not that odd as most tutorials also follow that approach.

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chc 5653 days ago
I don't see how what you said disagrees with what I said aside from a minor semantic quibble. You can't parse any other language with certainty without knowing all the keywords either. For example, in Ruby, you might see the identifier "continue" by itself. Is this a method call, variable access or keyword? What about "private"? No way to know if you don't know all the keywords. This is precisely cognate with nene's objection that you can't tell whether "new" is a keyword in Zinc if you don't know the language's keywords.

You can form a rough guess of what the various tokens are in a snippet of Ruby code without knowing all the keywords, and you can do the same with Zinc code. Any additional difficulty is most likely because you're less familiar with Zinc, not because it has the nearly universal property of needing to know the full grammar to correctly parse arbitrary programs.

And I agree, playing around with a language is a great way to learn. But if you play around without reading about the things you're doing first, you should expect not to always know what you're doing. That's a huge part of the learning process.

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jbri 5653 days ago
No, you can't really do the same with Zinc. In Ruby, if there's a keyword somewhere, it's pretty damn obvious it's not part of an identifier.

With Zinc, you need to know what all the keywords are just to tell what the name of something is.

And that doesn't even start on additions to the language completely breaking your code because you used that word in an identifier somewhere...

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