[Info-vax] A DCL wish list of sorts...

[pcanagnostopoulos at gmail.com]

On Friday, March 22, 2019 at 3:58:20 AM UTC-4, Phillip Helbig (undress to reply) wrote:
> As long as it is not documented to work (I don't think that it is), it 
> should be fixed.  Otherwise, one could fix no bugs at all, since someone 
> might rely on the undocumented, wrong behaviour.

I agree in principle, but programming languages are a bit different in this regard. In this case, the behavior is not wrong; it is arguably a shortcut. But I would be in favor of fixing it if it isn't explicitly documented.

Another interesting quoting example was the command definition compiler before I rewrote it for V2.x. It allowed arbitrary unquoted strings in certain places in the syntax of the command definition statements. I had to support that in the new compiler even though the official syntax now required quotes. Therein lies a tale.

Fortunately, people designing programming languages are now stricter in their specification of the lexical and syntactic elements. Well, except for Perl.

~~ Paul