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Proposed grammar change: forbid lines with >1 n-expr that end with "." David A. Wheeler 27 Jul 2013 21:05 UTC

I'm proposing a minor grammar change, and want to know of any objections.

Currently, in sweet-expressions, if a line has more than one neoteric-expression
and the last expression is ".", the "." is interpreted as the symbol
whose spelling is the single character ".".  E.G.:
quote .
=> (quote |.|)

I propose making this an error instead, to improve error detection.
It's fairly unusual to want this on *purpose*.  Usually "." introduces
the cdr of a pair. This would detect accidental use, if you *wanted* to do this,
you'd then have to escape it - say like this:
quote |.|
=> (quote |.|)

The grammar change is trivial, and makes the grammar simpler. In ANTLR/Java:
 rest returns [Object v]
-  : PERIOD /* Improper list */
-      (hspace+  pp=post_period {$v = $pp.v;}
-       | /*empty*/   {$v = list(".");})
+  : PERIOD hspace+ pp=post_period {$v = $pp.v;} /* Improper list */

A period on a line by *itself* would continue to mean that the next
line (at the same indent level) is the cdr of the given list.

Any objections?  I plan to check this into the development branch, so
we can experiment with it, but it'll be easy to pull out if there are objections.

--- David A. Wheeler