Meaningful identifiers are all the rage these days, but who needs or wants to see the word expression repeated six dozen times?
We can already abbreviate the head of a production rule by starting a line with | (after optional whitespace) so why not a simple, consistent way to refer back to that same head with some simple meta-syntactic element?
I propose the underline _ as standing in for "it", the way it does in perl.
Meaningful identifiers are all the rage these days, but who needs or wants to see the word
expression
repeated six dozen times?We can already abbreviate the head of a production rule by starting a line with
|
(after optional whitespace) so why not a simple, consistent way to refer back to that same head with some simple meta-syntactic element?I propose the underline
_
as standing in for "it", the way it does inperl
.