# Editorial: A Brief Essay on Lexical Ambiguity by G. Irwin

DevFeed: [Editorial: A Brief Essay on Lexical Ambiguity by G. Irwin](<https://devfeed.tech/articles/editorial-a-brief-essay-on-lexical-ambiguity-by-g-irwin-22373.md>)

Original publisher: [Read original article](<https://www.red-lang.org/2019/11/editorial-brief-essay-on-lexical.html>)

Author: Unknown (noreply@blogger.com)

Published: 2019-11-19T23:16:00Z

Content type: opinion

Language: en

Sources: [Red](<https://devfeed.tech/sources/red.md>)

Topics: [Red](<https://devfeed.tech/topics/red.md>), [Programming](<https://devfeed.tech/topics/programming.md>)

Tags: [community](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/community.md>), [editorial](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/editorial.md>), [languages](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/languages.md>), [lexer](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/lexer.md>), [syntax](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/syntax.md>)

## AI overview

An editorial essay examines lexical ambiguity in Red and the trade-off between adding specialized lexical forms and preserving a language's flexibility, usability, and learnability. It argues that new lexical forms offer diminishing value and that a constrained hierarchy can help users remember rules.

## Source excerpt

The original commentary was posted in Red's Gitter channel, here, by Gregg Irwin, one of our core team members, in response to various requests for the ability to create new datatypes in Red. As a writer, Red has always appealed to me because of its flexibility; but, of course, "the [lexicon] devil is in the details," as the idiom goes (okay, I edited that idiom a little, but it was too cool a link to pass up). It means the more specific we try to be, the more challenges and limitations we encounter, and we can lose some of the amazing versatility of the language. On the other hand, precision and refinement--the "exact right word at the exact right time," can powerfully enhance a language's utility. The dynamic tension between what he calls "generality and specificity, human friendliness and artifice," in the text below, can be an energetic ebb and flow that serves to strengthen our language, to make it more robust. Two quotes from community members provide some context: _____________________________ > The real problem is not number of datatypes, but the lexical syntax of the new ones. -@Oldes > ...However if something like utype! is added, nothing prevents you from (ab)using system/lexer/pre-load and reinventing whole syntax. -@Rebolek "I don't support abusing system/lexer/pre-load, and (in the long view) there will almost certainly be special cases where a new lexical form makes sense. We can't see the future, so we can't rule it out. But, and this is key, how much value does each new one add? I believe that each new lexical form adds less value, and there is a point of diminishing returns. This is not just a lexical problem for Red, but for humans. We have limited capacity to remember rules, and a constrained hierarchy helps enormously here. Think more like linguists, and less like programmers or mathematicians. In language we have words and numbers. Numbers can be represented as words, with their notation being a handy shortcut for use in the domain of mathemati