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Weird Lexical Syntax
Let's explore the most unusual lexical syntax of popular programming languages.
The languages I decided to support are Ada, Assembly, BASIC, C, C#, C++, COBOL, CSS, D, FORTH, FORTRAN, Go, Haskell, HTML, Java, JavaScript, Julia, JSON, Kotlin, ld, LISP, Lua, m4, Make, Markdown, MATLAB, Pascal, Perl, PHP, Python, R, Ruby, Rust, Scala, Shell, SQL, Swift, Tcl, TeX, TXT, TypeScript, and Zig. The new highlighter and chatbot interface has made llamafile so pleasant for me to use, combined with the fact that open weights models like gemma 27b it have gotten so good, that it's become increasingly rare that I'll feel tempted to use Claude these days. We'll notice that this particular BASIC implementation didn't require a closing quote on strings, variable names have these weird sigils, and keywords like goto are lexed eagerly out of identifiers.
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