Philosophical musings: interpreting models

[Tom Novelli]

On 7 Sep 1999, Laurent Martelli wrote:
......
> So I'd rather have one language (understand one semantic), and have
> the opportunity to change the syntax to make it more user-friendly for
> different domains. Take LISP. Most people think it has a very
> inconvenient syntax because of all the parenthesis. However, it has
> one of the cleanest semantic. What prevents us from wrting a special
> editor that would allow us to write (2+5)*3 instead of (* 3 (+ 2 5)) ? 

Better yet, add an infix parser to a LISP or FORTH interpreter.  It's
clean and simple.  For convenience I'd add a little special syntax:

	(expression) = prefix (LISP-like) code
	[expression] = infix (FORTRAN-like) code
	{expression} = postfix (FORTH-like) code

The choice of characters is somewhat arbitrary, as long as there aren't
any conflicts.  And it need not be hard-coded.  I haven't thought it out
thoroughly but it seems like a good idea.  I hear POPLOG has had something
like that for the past 30 years... but they were greedy and kept it
hush-hush.

--
Tom Novelli