Frank,
> Perhaps for a production 'Hello World' printer, but not for a trivial-yet-working
> example to put up against Derek's claim that program understanding might not exist,
> which is what I was doing. I'm not trying to teach C programming here, and I
> think focussing on arguable deficiencies in the quality of the example code
> is missing the point about whether program understanding might exist.
Actually, I disagree. The fact that the language allows you to write a valid program
with so much ambiguity in the operational sematics shows, for me, a real problem with
the programming language. Of course this is a comment for the C standards committee
and the compiler writers not the PPIG group. However, the issue is that PP has had
no, to my knowledge, input on any programming language design. Linguistics has had
some input via grammar etc. but PP always appears to be following and explaining
rather than contributing constructively. Perhaps the time has come for the PPIG group
to define an superior programming language -- if PP has its knowledge in order then it
should be able to do better than the computer scientists?
> I think it's interesting that the responses have been of the form 'this is
> not a very good program' or 'this program has ambiguous or undefined behaviour'
> rather than 'no C programmer could understand this program'. I believe this
> means something. :-)
I think you are right (despite the smiley), it does mean something. For me, it means
that the quality of a programming language and the programs constructed using that
language is an important issue. Simpler, less ambiguous programs are easier to
undestand. Whether this is to do with symmetries or the ease of construction of
abstractions I cannot say but it is a seriously interesting problem and I wish someone
could tell me the answer.
On a personal basis, I know when a program is good. It is usually because I can
construct a mental model of the semantics (declarative and operations) quickly and
easily and because the program solves the problem neatly and efficiently. Whether my
mental model uses patterns or programming plans or what I am unsure. What I am sure
of is that PP should have one or more theories on this and the tenor of the debate so
far indicates that possibly it does not have any.
> (By the way, the program text above compiles and runs without warning or error on
> my Linux workstation using the default settings for the system's usual tools.)
But try with the -Wall flag.
Backward compatibility is the bane of progress !
Russel.
======================================================================
Professor Russel Winder Professor of Computing Science
Department of Computer Science Fax: +44 20 7848 2851/+44 20 7848 2913
King's College London [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Strand, London WC2R 2LS, UK http://www.dcs.kcl.ac.uk/staff/russel/
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