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As a sidenote to your sidenote: I've noticed that the term "syntax" seems to have two different meanings nowadays. There's the technical meaning, namely "the rules that govern how characters are parsed into abstract syntax tree nodes", which in your example, would cover whether Rust shoud use `.` or `::` as a namespace separator, whether to use `[]` or `<>` for generics, that sort of thing. (Both of which have trade-offs in constraining how other parts of the language can be designed.) But I think sometimes, people use "syntax" in a blanket "how the language looks" way — that is, whether it's symbol-heavy, whether it's word-based, whether it's information-light or information-dense, and so on. This makes it more a function of which features of expressivity the language chooses to expose, than the individual syntactic choices that determine which characters we use and for what. Again in Rust's case, it has attributes, it has namespace separators, it has the zero-tuple, it has generics, and it has lifetimes, all of which need some way to be expressed. Don't get me wrong, you're allowed to not use a language if you don't like the way it looks visually. Or maybe it makes good use of a certain character that's hard to type on your particular keyboard layout. That's fine. I also can't decree that either of these uses of the term "syntax" are wrong. But when we're talking about language syntax, it's important to remember when you're talking about syntax, and when you're instead talking about language features. If you don't like the way lifetimes look, that's one thing; if you don't like the way lifetimes make you change the way you write code, that's another. So I have to ask: of those four code snippets, how would you prefer to write them? What would you change? And can you get away with making those changes without breaking anything else? |