#matlab is the wooooorst

[mszegedy]

7 am thought: is there a worse syntactic decision ever made in a popular programming language than matlab having "..." as its line continuation operator? like okay php's ternary operator being left-associative is definitely much worse but i'm thinking more in terms of symbol choice (i.e. vocabulary) than grammar. is there anything less convenient than needing to set aside 4 entire characters to continue a line?

having "<-" as the assignment operator in r is up there i guess but i think "..." is still worse since it's one character longer and explicitly goes in a place where you're by definition already running out of space

i wonder if the decision to make macros syntactically indistinguishable from functions in lisp counts. it killed the entire language family

…but it was also considered lisp's greatest feature so idk