• balsoft@lemmy.ml
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    8 days ago

    I agree, but then there’s also some other niceties that come from expression parsers in the language itself (as noted in the article): syntax highlighting, LSP, a more complete AST for editors like helix.

    • frezik@midwest.social
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      8 days ago

      Syntax highlighting works fine as long as your language has a way to distinguish regexes from common strings. Another place where Perl did it right decades ago and the industry ignored it.

      • balsoft@lemmy.ml
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        8 days ago

        Nah, the language itself should be as simple as possible. Bloating it with endless extensibility and features is exactly what makes Perl a write-only language in many cases and why it is becoming less and less relevant with time.

        • frezik@midwest.social
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          8 days ago

          Except it has some really good ideas that should be copied. There are other languages that have a syntax for denoting regex, such as ~r'foo' in Elixir. This gets the syntax highlighting you need without a big addition to the language.