[CMake-Promote] Fwd: Are parenthesis-free calls a Good?

Brandon Van Every bvanevery at gmail.com
Thu Jan 31 14:00:49 EST 2008


I've been lurking on the Lua mailing list.  Seems to be a hotbed of
people trying out new language syntaxes.  I'm not convinced that's
beneficial for CMake.  The current discussion is about making
parentheses unnecessary for function calls.  My input is that having
parentheses makes it easier for me to parse and metaprogram the code,
having lotsa different ways to do things makes it harder to
metaprogram, having different options increases the learning curve and
documention support burden, and mainstream programmers recognize f(x)
as a function call.  Against that, other people are saying that
getting rid of parentheses is friendlier for non-programmers.  Not
really CMake's concern, in my opinion.

Anyways, in the course of events it was mentioned that someone ditched
CMake in favor of SCons because of CMake's custom language.
Marketing-wise, I think there's a fork in the road here that CMake
needs to address.  Many programmers believe they want a "full
featured" programming language, and we should deal with the truth or
falsehood of that perception somehow.


Cheers,
Brandon Van Every


---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Alexander Gladysh <agladysh at gmail.com>
Date: Jan 31, 2008 1:15 PM
Subject: Re: Are parenthesis-free calls a Good? (was Re: patch:
C-style string lexing)
To: Lua list <lua at bazar2.conectiva.com.br>

Brandon wrote:
> > Or like the sample from Alexander
> >
> > foo "name"
> > {
> >   bar "bar";
> >   baz "baz";
> > }
>
> Hrm, to me the bar and baz look like type declarations.
>
> I've been lurking around here trying to decide if there's value in
> using Lua as an embedded language for the CMake cross-platform build
> tool.  http://www.cmake.org  <...>

As a side note, when some time ago we've considered which
crossplatform build tool to use for our next project, we've dropped
CMake due to its "custom" language. We've decided to use SCons then...
and now we've happily moved to Lua-based premake. :-)

Alexander.



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