On Sun, 25 Dec 2011 07:19:47 +1100, Andrei Alexandrescu
<seewebsiteforem...@erdani.org> wrote:
On 12/24/11 9:54 AM, Derek wrote:
I'm sure you are totally correct; I'm not really a C++ coder. And I'm
sure you also process the specialist/expert level of D knowledge to make
reading contemporary D code a non-issue.
Well I'm also a specialist in C++, actually more so than D as I have
longer experience with C++ and wrote more code in it.
LOL ... that went without saying ... your reputation precedes you.
But when compared to spoken
language text, D code can appear quite obtuse to average coders. And I
believe this is main do to the very high use of non-alphabetic symbols
and a level of overloading of both punctuation characters and reserved
words.
This issue (analogy with human language) has been a long preoccupation
of me. I have ended up at an odd point - I lost interest.
I'm sorry that I wasn't clear enough (irony?) but I'm not advocating that
programming languages resemble human languages, just that in comparison -
comparing D text with English text for example - D source code can be
harder to read. Probably because D relies much more on the precise use of
punctuation symbols than English text does. Our latin-alphabet focused
training has to take in a larger character set, and with nearly all D
punctuation being single-character entities, one has to read the text more
carefully than English text.
I am not suggesting that D change any of this because that would turn D
into something else and thus alienate most of its adherents.
--
Derek Parnell
Melbourne, Australia
