"T. Onoma" <transami / runbox.com> schrieb im Newsbeitrag
news:E1ALe7I-00016k-AI / odie.runbox.com...
>
> I've nearly finished my RCR -- the big one on Uniform Data Structures
I've been sitting on for years. I'd very much appreciate if others would
look at it and comment, so i can be sure to nail it down before
submitting. [ or bail if need be :) ]
>
> It is at: http://www.rubygarden.org/ruby?DoNotPassGo

Hm, it's not totally clear to me what you are up to and what would be
gained.  From what I understand you're aiming at unifying the syntax for
various different things, namely method invocations, operators and all
sorts of type definitions (class and method mainly).  (All following
comments are based on this understanding.)

Since we're talking about programming languages there are technical and
human apsects here.  It might be technically feasible to unify all those
constructs but the price is likely that certain things are deferred from
compilation to runtime: if there's no syntactic difference between a class
definition and a method invocation then the runtime types of the artefacts
involved determines the semantics.  This may well impose a performance
penalty.

The human aspect is twofold: while it may be simpler to *write* programms
it is likely to be much more difficult to *read* program code.

And a third aspect: while reading your RCR Lisp came to my mind even
before you mention it yourself.  It's not clear to me where exactly is the
difference between your proposal and Lisp's approach.  If it is too small
I wonder what will be gained by yet another Lisp language.

Kind regards

    robert