Larry Wall's comment on python...

[Christopher Barber]

"Chris Gonnerman" <chris.gonnerman at newcenturycomputers.net> writes:
> No smiley this time... I really hate typing curly after curly.
> It makes me wonder that anyone *likes* the freakin' things so
> much that they named a LANGUAGE after them.

The Curl language was indeed named after curly braces, but not because we like
them so much but because the nature of the language required some sort of
bracketing delimiter punctation and the curly brace seemed a good choice for
this.  One of the points of the language is to make it easy to do powerful
text markup and otherwise mix code and text.  To support this, you really need
some way to distinguish code from text.  For instance:

   {paragraph Hello {bold Bold} World!}

Although it might be annoying to have to type the curly braces, I really don't
know what the alternative would be. Parens and square brackets are used much
more frequently in text than curly braces and would have to be escaped more
frequently, and SGML syntax is much worse.  I don't think there is a way to do
this kind of thing using Pythonic syntax.

- Christopher