Re: 6502 illegal opcodes questions

["mdj" <mdj.mdj@gmail.com>]

Michael J. Mahon wrote:

> Many years later, I think that the "offside rule" for delimiting
> blocks simply by indentation is a very nice approach.  Why on
> earth should white space, the most significant characteristic of
> text to the human eye, be ignored by most programming languages?

Once you bed down the definition of white space, you've committed the
language to a certain aesthetic form quite unnecessarily. People have
been arguing for *years* over such aestheic issues in most programming
languages without any clear consensus. Perhaps one day we'll reach one,
but beauty being in the eye of the beholder I somewhat doubt it :-)

An interesting language in this regard is Ruby, who's syntax is such
that BOTH whitespace or statement delimiters may be used, depending on
what is felt most appropriate to the developer.

Actually the first language I've used seriously where carriage returns
are considered statement terminators and I've not immediately disliked
the language. In fact, Ruby allows some beautifully concise code. The
language is so flexible in fact, that you can override almost any facet
of it, in effect making it very simple to construct domain-specific
languages, or sublanguages, to better suit the problem domain. Lots of
fun.

Matt