(Oops. Sent only to WK first.) Let me say first, I am not a language designer, just a Unix sysadmin who happens to be fond of Lisp, but likes to keep his eye on interesting programming languages. I feel compelled to jump into this discussion.
On Nov 22, 2007 6:07 PM, Waldemar Kornewald <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > I do understand that you like this kind of elegance, but I think the > price to pay is pretty high because it increases the likelihood of > mistakes (in either math or Smalltalk "mode"). Modality is a > well-known cause of errors and should be avoided. Precedence could > simply apply to +-*/, so nothing complex to learn. Is this really a price to pay? I don't think I exaggerate when I say that by far the majority of the software in the world sucks really, really hard in various ways: it's brittle, error-prone, may be harmless alone but combines disastrously with other software, etc. Most of this seems to be due to human difficulties in coming to terms with complexity. In contemplating the leviathan, steaming pile of barely working software that infests the computers of the world, I am flabbergasted to find completely arbitrary precedence rules offered as "simple" but also necessary. Do we have studies and numbers on the sorts of bugs programmers spend most of their time on? How often are math precedence rules really a problem compared to, say, failures to understand the behavior of your data structures or how your OS allocates resources? *Everything* we do to communicate with computers is pretty unnatural. I don't see how learning different precedence rules to program is any different from learning that "if (a == 3 or 4 or 5) ..." doesn't mean the same thing to a computer that it means in English. -- William Annis www.aoidoi.org _______________________________________________ fonc mailing list [email protected] http://vpri.org/mailman/listinfo/fonc
