andrel wrote:
> My only point was that on a fundamental level the difference between th
e 
> categories is so blurred that you should not expect a language to have 

> visual clues to distinguish between them. At least not for languages 
> based on an abstract concept. 

I'm just going to have to disagree here. I think any category that has 
syntax[1] is going to have syntactic equivalents of reserved words.

[1] By which I mean to rule out things like FORTH and Tcl and such, much 

of whose syntax is defined by the code itself rather than the compiler.

> For languages designed to just give a 
> slightly abstract representation of current hardware and current 
> programming techniques that may be quite different.

I don't think it has anything to do with how high-level it is. It has to 

do with whether you can parse the syntax of the language. If "case" is 
allowed to be a variable, and "->" is allowed to be a function, then 
there's no way to write the code in http://hpaste.org/10565 and have it 
make sense.

> The point I was trying to make is that the fact that there is no 
> difference in syntax of functions and arguments in lambda calculus is s
o 
> fundamental that it is not a good idea to use these terms to analyse 
> Haskell.

And can you name a variable λ or . or ) or ( in the lambda calculus?


>> Sure. And if you have an entity called "o" or "+" or "case" or "start"
?
> yes?

How do you distinguish that variable name from the syntactic form that 
"case" currently introduces in Haskell?

-- 
Darren New / San Diego, CA, USA (PST)

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