Why not allow empty code blocks?

[Rustom Mody]

> I think the real reason is not willing to admit that the language lacks
> something that could actually be useful, and especially not to an
> upstart on usenet who is not even an expert in that language.

And earlier you said:

> But dedicated forms (even if they just map to 'while' or 'for') wouldn't
> hurt. Syntax is free after all, and it's about expressing exactly what
> you mean.

You are in effect repeating yourself
What you are saying would be true if syntax were free — or even cheap

However a case may be made that syntax is one of the most wastefully expensive 
hobby with which computer scientists waste their time

First some…
<background>
Turing-completeness or Church-Turing thesis says that all languages are the same —
identical power. And yet in the last ½ century of computers there is as chaotic a babel
of computer languages as there is of natural languages in the last 5000 years of human
history.

IOW that L₁ and L₂ are same in power means that the difference is entirely in syntax

Of course we need to understand syntax as
- super-superficial — lexical
- superficial — CFG grammar — what is normally called ‘syntax’
- deeper but still static aspects eg type structure

More at http://blog.languager.org/2015/04/poverty-universality-structure-0.html
[Heh! I see it is related to another thread of yours!]
</background>

Ok lets agree we need both C (like) and Python (like) languages
because they serve very different purposes.

But do we really need Python and Perl and Ruby and Tcl and Pike and …?
Or bash and zsh and ksh and powershell and …?

Now lets try to quantify the cost of this bedlam

gcc is 15 million lines of code. How much is that in man-years?
I guess somewhere between 100 and 1000

But that’s just the compiler

One needs a development environment.
Java folks tend towards eclipse
C# towards Visual Studio

Evidently eclipse is nearly 50 million lines of code(!!)
https://dzone.com/articles/eclipse-indigo-released

One may expect VS to be of comparable order.

And as the ide-divide points out, choosing a fancy language implies choosing an underpowered IDE
And vice-versa:
http://blog.osteele.com/posts/2004/11/ides/

This is exactly the cost I am talking about:
If people did not spend their time inventing newer and newer
languages — especially when that is just fiddling with syntax —
the IDEs and other necessary tooling that is needed for practical
usage would have the chance to develop

So to amplify Steven’s
> No offense intended Bart, but for all we know every single one of your
> benchmarks are faked, your interpreters are buggy pieces of garbage, and for
> all your self-promotion

If your language(s) gain enough traction as to contribute something beyond the 
language — Great! All power to you!

But if its just one more (misshapen) brick in the babel of
computer languages then you are an anti-social element, of course
not on a big scale like a terrorist¹ but let us say of the scale
of someone who litters public spaces


¹ Stupid word! Those who use it should also be considered anti-social