This is a good article.  Thanks for that.  Did you notice this part?

"[Spohrer 1986b] found that many novice bugs occur when the user generates
code in an order that is different than the built-in operator precedence
in the language. The user expects that the program will execute in the order
of generation, rather than according to the operator precedence rules of the
language. This suggests that all operator precedence should be explicit
rather than implicit. For example, expressions could be automatically
parenthesized to show their evaluation order."

I read this to mean what we were saying before:  most users expect
math to evaluate as written, not by switching to a difference
precedence.

On Dec 11, 2007 12:48 PM, Waldemar Kornewald <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> Hi,
> maybe this is of interest to you (probably the VPRI members already
> know it, though):
> http://www-2.cs.cmu.edu/~pane/cmu-cs-96-132.html
> It's a collection of empirical studies and expert opinions about
> programming language usability for novices. It also mentions visual
> languages. The paper might at least be useful for "Next Etoys", but I
> hope it'll also be interesting for other (to be invented) languages.
>
> Bye,
> Waldemar Kornewald
>
> _______________________________________________
> fonc mailing list
> [email protected]
> http://vpri.org/mailman/listinfo/fonc
>

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