Simon Wascher <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes: > Any expression a person wants to use should be legal as long as it does > not collide with the integrity of the syntax. > Not asking all the time "why should we allow this ?" but "Why not?"
No. Extraneous ways of writing down the same thing means that programs which process the notation need to be more complicated in order to process all the possible variants instead of just one that is standardized. More complicated programs have a greater likelihood of containing mistakes. We emphatically do not need programs that contain more mistakes than necessary -- the world is full of them already. On a more abstract level, having several ways of writing down the same thing makes the standard longer. A longer standard takes longer for a person to read and understand, and therefore the extra complexity should be restricted to things that actually add expressive power to the ABC language. Allowing `1&3' and `1+3' in addition to `1,3' does not add expressive power, thus should be rejected. Finally, people new to ABC will wonder whether `1,3', `1&3' and `1+3' actually do mean the same thing in ABC or whether there are subtle, non-obvious differences between the three that they don't know about. This will be unnecessarily confusing. The word is `KISS'. Anselm -- Anselm Lingnau .......................................... [EMAIL PROTECTED] I'd rather poke myself in the eye with a sharp stick than do GUI programming in Java. -- Mo DeJong To subscribe/unsubscribe, point your browser to: http://www.tullochgorm.com/lists.html
