As of now, the specification says that "both variables and constants can be named with any Unicode character or string."
It poses a problem because then, variables could be named with the space symbol (`) which would inevitably lead to parsing errors, because parsing is hard and the current compiler is not happy when I tell it to use spaces as variables. I propose that the character set allowed is reduced to "any Unicode character or string, except the *whitespace* ( `) character and strings which contain it".
To be clear, we still should be able to use some whitespace or blank characters, such as (alt+255), tab, newline, and others. First of all, because that rocks; second, because it means we can write variables like in inform7 that look like full sentences; finally, because any user of the code might want to port their whitespace codebase to DreamBeard and assigning white characters to instructions can make it happen. I think the spec should make it clear that DreamBerd is so perfect that it even is compatible with the whitespace programming language.
As of now, the specification says that "both variables and constants can be named with any Unicode character or string."
It poses a problem because then, variables could be named with the space symbol (
`) which would inevitably lead to parsing errors, because parsing is hard and the current compiler is not happy when I tell it to use spaces as variables. I propose that the character set allowed is reduced to "any Unicode character or string, except the *whitespace* (
`) character and strings which contain it".To be clear, we still should be able to use some whitespace or blank characters, such as
(alt+255), tab, newline, and others. First of all, because that rocks; second, because it means we can write variables like in inform7 that look like full sentences; finally, because any user of the code might want to port their whitespace codebase to DreamBeard and assigning white characters to instructions can make it happen. I think the spec should make it clear that DreamBerd is so perfect that it even is compatible with the whitespace programming language.