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by Duncan Mackenzie.
Original Post: Matt Warren on Language Design
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Feed Description: Duncan is the Visual Basic Content Strategist at MSDN, the editor of the Visual Basic Developer Center (http://msdn.microsoft.com/vbasic), and the author of the "Coding 4 Fun" column on MSDN (http://msdn.microsoft.com/vbasic/using/columns/code4fun/default.aspx). While typically Visual Basic focused, his blogs sometimes wanders off of the technical path and into various musing of his troubled mind.
Matt provides us with some insights into the world of language design, a field that most of us have only dabbled in via a university course, with his discussion of keywords, operators and the problems with extending an existing programming language after its original release.
It amazes me how difficult it is to design new features to a programming language. Once a language is baked in its original form it’s almost impossible to add new semantics let alone syntax rules. Operators are hellish. You want to invent new ones, but you are generally limited to the common symbols found on the standard keyboard.
Click here to read his entire post (and his 'interesting' conclusion): Programming in the Blue
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