On Thu, Dec 20, 2007 at 04:39:38PM -0600, Scott Wood wrote:
Marian Balakowicz wrote:
I was thinking of a syntax that would be similar to regular data sections which are enclosed in [] braces. Something like: prop = {/path/to/file};
This one overloads {} based primarily on whether there's an equal sign before it... a bit icky. Plus, sooner or later we'll run out of special characters to assign meaning to, and we'll become Perlish in the process. :-)
Indeed. Plus I'd liked to keep { } consistently for delimiting lexical contexts which will accept node or property names without quoting.
Plus you can't even count on the { being after an =, because you could have:
prop = "a string followed by", {/a/file};
I went with text-between slashes as it's an already-established keyword marker.
or prop = [file:/path/to/file];
This is ambiguous; file: will be scanned as a label unless we give precedence to it as a keyword, and I don't think we want to go down the path of reserved words when we have other mechanisms available to separate the namespaces.
And it's gratuitously similar to bytestring notation.