[sc34wg3] CTM draft dtd. 2007-09-09 - Templates

[Lars Heuer]

Hi Steve,

> To my mind, and I think also most users who are not also programmers, (1) is
> far tidier, more readable, more visually appealing and less confusing than a
> syntax in which the colons are sometimes there (names and occurrences) and
> sometimes not (associations expressed through templates):

No, if something walks like a duck and quacks like a duck, I would
call it a duck. And if make binary template invocations look similar
to occurrences, template invocations walk like an occurrence and quack
like an occurrence, but they are not occurrences.

And stealing identifiers from the namespace is not very user friendly,
too.

It has nothing to do with a programmer's point of view. The
side-effect of your proposal is that the parser has more work to do
and it puts some burden the person who wants to implement that thing,
but that's not the main point.

Occurrences look different from names, topics look different from
associations... Why should binary template invocations look like
occurrences with all the disadvantages it includes (for the *user*)?

Best regards,
Lars
-- 
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