[GRASS5] Re: intersect sites with polygons?

[Glynn Clements]

Christoph Simon wrote:

> > Well, the trend in language design seems to be moving away from
> > requiring whitespace. More generally, the trend in language design
> > seems to be ever-closer compatibility with C; it's open to debate as
> > to whether this is good or bad, but it's getting pretty clear that
> > taking an opposite path in any particular instance is going against
> > the flow.
> 
> Sorry, didn't get your point here. "10a" (unquoted) isn't a legal
> C-language token. OTOH, I don't restrict anything which isn't
> restricted in C, all the other way round. Using quotes, any name can
> get any characters. v.mapcalc currently even is more liberal than
> grass, as it also allows for 8-bit characters. In any case, using
> quotes, anything is possible.

My point was primarily that, so far as possible, whitespace should be
optional, e.g. "foo - bar" and "foo-bar" should be equivalent, so
requiring non-alphanumeric map names to be quoted is preferable to
requiring whitespace around operators.

Most of the common programming languages restrict "identifiers" to a
set of characters which is disjoint from the set of characters used
for infix operators, so this ambiguity doesn't arise. Consequently,
requiring whitespace around operators is likely to contradict users'
experience and habits.

-- 
Glynn Clements <glynn.clements at virgin.net>