On 29/11/2007, Waldemar Kornewald <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > On Nov 29, 2007 5:36 PM, Igor Stasenko <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > > But what if new syntax is a cornerstone concept of a language? > > I only know of two examples: Lisp and Python. Both of them cause very > controversial syntax discussions, but one of them seems to go too far > for most people. > > I can't explain why Smalltalk is even less popular than Lisp. Is it > the lack of a good IDE, the syntax, or both? At least, with Lisp it's > pretty clear why the syntax is needed. > > I also don't know how much more power a language needs to offer in > order to overcome the syntax barrier. It seems to be pretty much, > though. :) > > Maybe it's also not clear whether Smalltalk itself (instead of the > IDE) actually provides more power? > > Some of these questions might be answered by this project. > > > And teaching children that rules _CAN_ be changed to conform their > > needs or to be able to use a new tool, haves much more positive > > impact. > > And obviously, this is the *only* way we can teach this fact? By > making math less consistent? Sorry, but that's almost funny. :) > Excuse me, but i can't see how absence of precedence rules in math makes it less consistent. Actually, as you may know, these rules is not belong to math at all. Its a convention for writing arithmetic expressions. And in this domain there a defined a common symbols, like * for multiplication and + for addition. In pure math you can find a definition of binary operator on sets (and one of them are real numbers set), and different lemmas and theorems for them, but never find a theorem which proves, that using * symbol for multiplication is the only right way, or proving that multiplication operator have higher priority than addition :)
This is my last post in this topic. -- Best regards, Igor Stasenko AKA sig. _______________________________________________ fonc mailing list [email protected] http://vpri.org/mailman/listinfo/fonc
