On 16-Jun-06, at 3:24 AM, Stefano Lanzavecchia wrote:
True, not into the syntax, but into their standard libraries. LINQ
will move
map/reduce even closer to the actual syntax of the language. But
it's up to
the people to use it. I would.
I once (1989) asked Ken Iverson why people did not adopt the same
syntax for their code as for the primitive operators of APL. This
led to a number of conversations about even correcting some of the
implementations of APL primitives that were not ideal. He explained
the need to get rid of the index origin. He talked about J.
But then, there are a lot of people contributing to J.
Like natural language, programming language can become pidgin or creole.
Donna
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
On 16-Jun-06, at 3:24 AM, Stefano Lanzavecchia wrote:
C and C++ don't have / , which is why it is in the STL. I could
write
/ in almost any language (particularly one with macros or a
preprocessor), but I'm specifically talking about mainstream
languages
building it into the syntax. Besides, I've had to read a lot of C+
+ and
I've never seen the use of accumulate.
Surely you don't expect the syntax of C and C++ to change... People
are
still writing Fortan70 despite the existence of Fortran90...
Currently, the majority of commercial code* is written in C, C++,
Java,
C#, and VB (6 and .NET). AFAIK, none of those languages have /
built
True, not into the syntax, but into their standard libraries. LINQ
will move
map/reduce even closer to the actual syntax of the language. But
it's up to
the people to use it. I would.
extent within each program). Better yet, I'd like to know what
proportion of professional programmers understand and use it**.
Probably very small. But... Have you ever read programs written by
a badly
trained APL developer? Is it the fault of the language the fact
that there
are thousands of so-so C++ developers? A colleague of mine once had
to write
a large and complex application in Excel using VBA. The first thing
he did
was to build himself a library of APL-like functions and
operators... Then
he wrote the add-in into this hybrid language. Unsurprisingly it
was at the
same time efficient, relatively bug-free and readable. But when I
showed
some people that it was possible to write rank-independent code in VB,
though it wasn't pretty, those people cringed in fear. Is it the
language's
fault or the bad training?
--
WildHeart'2k6 - mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]
My digipics and blogs: http://spaces.msn.com/members/wildy2k5/
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