[Grace-core] Some comments from Tijs on parsing Grace

[Prof. Andrew P. Black]

> On 27 Jul 2016, at 02:40 , James Noble <kjx at ecs.vuw.ac.nz> wrote:
> 
> Here's a request: could people run this over their code:
> 
> egrep "^(.*)method(.*))(.*),"   `find . -name \*.grace` |grep -v \} | grep -vi test

What are you trying to accomplish with this?

> (it won't find method decnls where the , is on a second line. but...)
> 
>> It is then still possible to state that the vararg formal will be bound to some unspecified object that supports iteration, but nothing else
> 
> which is how variadic parameters worked before, or originally.

> 
>> (although personally I think it should just be a standard library list/array object...).


Actually, variadic parameters were bound to sequences, which were standard library objects.  This caused horrible circular dependencies in the compiler, 
since the code generator needed to know about a library that it might not have compiled yet …
 
Now that [ _ ] is no longer an operator, I don’t think that there is a big problem using them for both lineups and type parameters.  But using ⟦ and ⟧ is so much more geeky!  With luck, it will frighten non-geek people off of using type parameters at all, which is probably a good thing.

Our development version of the web IDE lets you type [[ (without a space) and translates it to ⟦.   So I hope that the vinegar won’t be too strong. 

	Andrew
  

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