On 16/05/13 12:54, Andrew Barnert wrote:
Summarizing (more in hopes that someone will correct me if I've missed something important than to help you or anyone else...):
Implicit concatenation is bad because you often use it accidentally when you intended a comma.
For some definition of "often". If I've ever made this error, it was so long ago, and so trivially fixed, that I don't remember it.
There's no way a compiler or linter could help, because there's no programmatic way to distinguish good from bad uses:
Of course they can *help*. Linters can flag the use of implicit concatenation, and leave it up to the user to decide. That's helping. If you're like me, and use implicit concatenation frequently with few or no problems, then you'll configure the linter to skip the warning. If you're one of the people who rarely or never uses it deliberately, or you work for Google where it goes against their in-house style guide, then you'll tell the linter to treat it as an error. I think that this is the sort of issue that linters are designed to solve. -- Steven