Crosscut

The hypothetical syntax that I presented yesterday does not have any delimiters, like commas (,), to demarcate between different elements in a list, tuple, or map. This has precedence in the current syntax. Branch parameters are not delimited either.

I like the clean look this results in, but there are subtleties to consider. Thanks to postfix operators and stack-based evaluation, it's possible to even have more complex elements without ambiguity. Consider a list like [ a b 1 + ]. This is semantically unambiguous when evaluating it left to right (add a; add b; add 1; then take b and 1, add their sum).

But that doesn't mean it's a good idea. For one, it might be unambiguous, but that doesn't mean it's clear. Without delimiters, this must be formatted using whitespace to become readable. The other issue is syntactical ambiguity. The compiler can't make sense of this just by parsing it. It needs to run type-checking, at least.