[TUHS] On computerese

[arnold at skeeve.com]

Russ Cox <rsc at swtch.com> wrote:

> I'm a little late to the thread, but this is not quite true.
> rc's lexer and grammar treated = as a special
> symbol - just like ( or | or & or ; - and so it couldn't
> be used as a literal except when quoted.
> That is, "foo x=y" was a syntax error, not an equivalent to "x=y foo".

OK, distinction noted. It was a long time ago.

> One of the tidyings I did during covid lockdown was to rewrite
> rc's parser not to use yacc anymore [1], specifically to make
> it easy to allow "foo x=y". As I wrote in the commit message,
> dd fans rejoice! (Also fans of -foo=bar flag syntax.)

Very cool. Have other Plan 9 distros picked this up? Just wondering.

Thanks,

Arnold