The Angle Bracket Tax
John Lam imagines a world without the angle bracket tax. The angle-bracket is really only part of the tax. There's the quoted-attribute tax to consider as well. In the comments, Barry Gervin observed that VB programmers are probably feeling the curly brace and semicolon tax. Old time
make users probably feel it worse than anyone. But then NAnt and Ant users complain about the "significant whitespace" tax in make. In the end, it all comes down to delimiters. Parsers are never as good as you are at recognizing patterns. Presumably, the reason for the curly braces and semicolons is so that you can write something like this and still have the parser understand it:
project BuildAll default BuildAll { target BuildManifest { foreach(Line lab.dir in “manifest.txt”) nant(“${lab.dir}/app.build”, “Build”); } target BuildAll { foreach(Folder lab.dir in “.”) nant(“${lab.dir}/app.build”, “Build”); } target Clean { foreach(Folder lab.dir in “.”) nant(“${lab.dir}/app.build”, “Clean”); })Hmm, maybe that whitespace tax isn't such a bad thing, after all.