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On Apr 17, 2020, at 11:30, David Mertz <mertz@gnosis.cx> wrote:
I can't think of any either...
You know, an ellipsis is about the farthest thing from an *unmarked* elision that you can get [without brackets and reinsertion of a more verbose version of the thing you wanted to elide -ed]. But the hyphen example works. I said I was sure there must be examples. And anyway, in natural human language, elisions are usually best thought of as from a tree node rather than from a linear order. You wouldn’t really say that pro drop is “prefix elision” just because in its Japanese version the subject is the most commonly dropped pronoun and subjects often but not obligatory come first so the missing phrase would have been on the left if it weren’t missing. So, this wasn’t a great point of mine in the first place. But I think the rest of the argument stands. Multiple people in this thread have criticized the proposal without any of them stumbling on what { :spam, :eggs } is intended to mean, at least one person noticed that it’s similar to Lisp symbols, one other person proposed the exact same thing, etc., and as far as I know all of those people are native (at least certainly fluent) speakers of a LTR-written language (as were the designers of Lisp, most of the C committee, etc.). If Steve has a problem reading it, I think it’s probably just him, but of course if I’m wrong I hope (and expect) others will chime in.