[plt-dev] reading symbols beginning with colon as keywords?

Dave Gurnell wrote at 06/15/2009 04:50 AM:
> Changing things now (or in the future) for the sake of a single 
> character would be lots of work for very little gain.

My followup message was worded poorly.  I'm not advocating *switching*.  
I would very much like ":" to be *added* a shorthand or alternative for 
"#:", while continuing to support "#:".  (I appreciate the concern that 
the language not be bloated with two ways to do it, however, and I'm not 
sure how to resolve that.)

Describing why I think "#:" is so bad is difficult when there's a wide 
range of inclinations towards the *visual* (as opposed to, say, the 
*verbal*).  One tack that might work: should argument names visually 
dominate operation names?

If someone has use of a facility with gaze-tracking, I think you can get 
at least a CS MS thesis out of this question, and then do your doctoral 
work on visual/perceptual and cognition aspects of programming language 
syntax.

-- 
http://www.neilvandyke.org/