Richard O'Keefe <ok <at> cs.otago.ac.nz> writes:
>
>
> On 4/02/2012, at 12:13 AM, Gábor Lehel wrote:
> >
> > All of this said, record.field is still the most readable, intuitive,
> > and familiar syntax for selecting a field from a record that I know
> > of.
>
> Having learned COBOL and Algol 68 before Haskell was dreamed of,
> I regard
>
> field OF record
>
> as the most readable, intuitive, and familiar syntax. Given our
> background in reading natural language text, most of us probably
> thought once upon a time that '.' was the most readable, intuitive,
> and familiar syntax for terminating a statement, and in COBOL, NDL,
> and Smalltalk, it _is_. There's certainly nothing about a dot
> that suggests field selection, *unless* you happen to be familiar
> with a programming language that does it that way. ...
>
Richard, now you're just being playful.
Database access languages used record.field since COBOL days (well certainly
before SQL in 1969).
Assembler and linker languages often allowed dots within names.
I presume IPv4 dot-decimal comes from this.
I think the use of dot comes from section and sub-section numbering in large
documents. I have no idea when that dates from, but off the top of my head:
Principia Mathematica, Russell and Whitehead 1910
Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, Wittgenstein, 1918
(Admittedly Princ Math also uses dot (infix operator) as logical product. As
well, there's a dot separator between a quantifier's list of bound variables
(upside-down A, backwards E) and the bound term. Church's lambda notation
similarly uses a dot to separate the bound variables.)
There is one 'odd man out' when it comes to dot notation:
A few little-known programming languages have for some reason bucked the well-
established convention of small circle for function composition.
There's certainly nothing about a dot that suggests function composition,
*unless* ...
AntC
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