Delurking comments on the 0.1.5 specification

[Neal Gafter]

On Sat, Apr 3, 2010 at 12:11 PM, Jim Mayer <jim at pentastich.org> wrote:
> To my eye, the "[[" construct is significantly more visible than a
> single bracket would be. Comparing:
>
>    #(int x)[return x+1;]
>    #(int x){return x+1;}
>    #(int x)(x+1)
>    #(int x)[[x+1]]
>    {int x ==> x+1}
>    [[int x ==> x+1]]
>
> I find the first two wayto easy to mix up.

Agreed.  That's probably who no proposal has such visially similar but
semantically distinct forms.

> Design for usability is hard and outside of my comfort zone.  I'd be
> tempted to try to find an industrial designer and a typographer or two
> and see what they say.  That's actually a serious suggestion!

An industrial designer would suggest usability studies, but in the
realm of programming languages usability of a feature before the
programmer is exposed to the concepts and syntax is not typically as
important as usability after a bit of training, but that training is
one factor that makes usability studies for programming languages
hard.