On Nov 23, 2007 9:46 AM, Waldemar Kornewald <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > It's our familiarity with math, not a programming language. > > Am I the only one who has to work a lot with math? Maybe that explains > why you don't want to understand my problem.
Honestly. You don't know me well enough to tell me what I do or do not want. I'm asking my questions in good faith. > Does it suffice if I refer to common knowledge in interaction design > that modality results in errors? > > http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mode_(computer_interface) This seems rather to support my suspicion that adding special precedence rules to a language leads to trouble. What are arithmetic precedence rules but a separate syntactic mode, the imposition of a domain specific language onto a general one? It is true that most of my programming isn't arithmetic. Is it the case that most programming requires enough complex arithmetic to justify making parsing exceptions just to do that? Is it really necessary for a *general* programming language? About 7 to 10 years ago I pestered some computer sciencey types about this matter. Are there systematic studies of the sorts of errors programmers are most likely to make, rather than just anecdote? The answers were very disappointing. Unless researchers have recently started doing a lot more of this work, we're left with our intuitions and really no principled way to judge between them. I'll change my tune the instant someone can show solid research saying that special parsing rules for arithmetic precedence makes for more productive (faster, less buggy, etc) programmers. -- William Annis www.aoidoi.org _______________________________________________ fonc mailing list [email protected] http://vpri.org/mailman/listinfo/fonc
