arrow syntax unnecessary and the idea that "function" is too long

[Claus Reinke]

For a presumed-done area, there has been a lot of activity
in parser research recently, partially fueled by IDEs and DSLs
(model-driven development with good generated tool support).

For grammar spec purposes, it might be interesting to look 
at self-applications of these techniques (IDEs for parser 
development, with support for grammar analysis and 
debugging). I keep meaning to look at ANTLRWorks: 

    The ANTLR GUI Development Environment
    http://www.antlr.org/works/index.html

Anyway, the titles for two of those three urls, for those who
don't have time to look right now:

> http://www.cs.nyu.edu/rgrimm/papers/pldi06.pdf

    Better Extensibility through Modular Syntax
    Robert Grimm
 
> http://www.cs.rit.edu/~ats/projects/jsm/paper.xml

    Monadic Parsing using JavaScript
    Axel T. Schreiner

Independent of parsing, I recommend that readers of this
thread scroll down to the interpreter (search for 'eval'). It
gives an example of how an essential programming pattern
(monads) is technically supported in Javascript, but mostly
useless due to syntactic overhead: instead of bringing out
the essential aspects, they get burried in syntax (and if one
tries to shunt the 'return's out of the way, ASI says hello).

Javascript coders, when faced with this issue, tend to split
into two groups: one that abandons the variable binding 
functionality of monads and makes due with libraries, and
one that writes preprocessors (the author here, also
streamline.js and Jscex as just two recent examples from 
the nodejs list). 

Just as a further example for those still unconvinced by
the case for better function syntax: it isn't sufficient, but
it is necessary!-)
 
> http://www.cs.ucla.edu/~awarth/papers/dls07.pdf

404 for me?

Claus