Re: Syntatic sugar and identifier permissivity

[Jost Boekemeier <jostobfe at linux dot zrz dot TU-Berlin dot DE>]

Lalo Martins <lalo@hackandroll.org> writes:

> Actually most of OOP itself is syntatic sugar :-) so I'd like
> to request some sweetening of GOOPS. Get any character which is
> not valid in an identifier acording to r[45]rs; the comma would
> be specially good for that. 

I do agree that we need to support high level abstractions 
on top of GOOPS.  For example a reasonable OO system must support
genericity as examplified by eiffel.  GOOPS is like a OO assembly
language; everything is possible but you have to do everything
by hand.

But please let us keep the basic language API as clean as possible.
If we are starting to introduce special syntax into the low level
language API, I think it will be difficult to implement any high
level API you want on top of GOOPS.

Personally I think your suggestion is good.  But I think this
syntactic shugar should go into a separate module.  We can also support
the CLOS P:m syntax if we want to.

The syntax (foo:bar s ...) or (foo#.bar s ...) would then be
translated into the GOOPS method `(bar foo s ...)' -- or similar; how
GOOPS interacts with the module system has't been worked out yet.


Jost