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Yeah, I'm having to fight really hard to continue giving the language a shot after seeing that syntax. Let's see, from their Dining Philosophers example:

    []{
Already, the syntax is starting to look a little strange, but OK, I'll give it a shot.

    id = [int\];
Hm. Backslash seems to be used for something other than escaping. Not a good sign.

    =;
Huh? The equals operator is being used alone, with nothing on either side? That's really stretching the bounds of convention.

    -> --> <-> <-
We have various types of arrows that are used as syntax. In some cases, they're used as binary operators, in some cases as unary. Doubling up of dashes appears to change the meaning. This is really not looking good.

And then there's the example you mention. Besides how it looks; their example of solving a useful concurrency problem is "a bug-free, efficiently multithreaded real-time clock + infix calculator hybrid application"? Why would you even want that?

There may be something interesting here, but between their quite bizarre syntax and poorly chosen examples, they aren't doing a very good job of hooking me.



Hm. Backslash seems to be used for something other than escaping. Not a good sign.

From the tutorial[1]:

In ANI, \ means "latch". Basically, a latch is a place where you can "hold on to" an object of the specified type. A latch is like a box that you can put things in to, take things out of, and peek at what's inside.

[1] http://code.google.com/p/anic/wiki/Tutorial


The only thing worse than using backslash is using postfix backslash...


If it weren't for the long-running convention of using backslashes as escape characters, postfix backslash would make some kind of sense, at least visually.

Forward slashes are for prefixes, backward slashes are for postfixes. Nice parallel there :)


No, they would be perpendicular.


Aside from breaking the escaping convention, slashes in code give the page an unfortunate swirly quality. It seems like line other parallel or perpendicular can make the line of the page look it is at a different angle.




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