Natural language (a 1D stream of sounds, possibly written down using letters) _alone_ is not an optimal way to express ideas. This is why musicians, mathematicians, engineers etc. augment natural language with domain specific rich 2D visual languages, to leverage the huge processing power of the visual cortex. But yeah, it seems that, *given the 1d restriction*, the non-proportional font is sort of a local optimum. On the other hand, imagine math notated the same way programming languages are. That would be awful! IMHO, it is awful for PL, too, but everyone got used to it.
On Sat, Jul 20, 2013 at 3:03 AM, Pascal J. Bourguignon < [email protected]> wrote: > Pavel Bažant <[email protected]> writes: > > > It is just the programmers (well, perhaps not all of them) who seem to > > think that representing complex programs as equally spaced rows of > > fixed width characters from some limited charset is comfortable and > > efficient. > > Perhaps this will stop when programming languages won't care about > punctuation anymore. > > But apart from lisp which tries some minimalisp m on this point, most > programming languages are heavy on meaningful special character. > > The best way to have most of them stand out is to use a non-proportional > font, and even, programmers often use special non-proportional fonts > where special care to make punctuation extra visible has been put in > their design. (Eg. dots are more actually little bullets, not a mere > pixel). > > > > That said, some programming languages use a 2D matrix for the > source. Have a look for example at HAL/S: > http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HAL/S > > > > > -- > __Pascal Bourguignon__ http://www.informatimago.com/ > A bad day in () is better than a good day in {}. > You know you've been lisping too long when you see a recent picture of > George > Lucas and think "Wait, I thought John McCarthy was dead!" -- Dalek_Baldwin > _______________________________________________ > fonc mailing list > [email protected] > http://vpri.org/mailman/listinfo/fonc >
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