Craig DeForest writes:
> Quoth Luke Palmer on Monday 31 January 2005 03:46 pm,
> > C_{ijkl} = A_{ij} * B_{kl}
> >
> > You write either of:
> >
> > Â @C[$^i; $^j; $^k; $^l] = @A[$^i; $^j] * @B[$^k; $^l] Â
> > @C = Â @A[$^i; $^j] * @B[$^k; $^l] Â
>
> Hmm... This is both insanely great and also greatly insane.
>
> The issue is that, although the tensor notation is powerful, the readability
> is becoming lost in all the sigils/funny_characters on the thread variables.
>
> Most of the non-perl-geek scientific-computing people I know already balk at
> the '$' and '@' characters because they increase the amount of black noise in
> scientific code too much; constructions like that just might send them all
> screaming back to FORTRAN. Is there a way to generalize that reduces the
> amount of black noise so that the expression shines through?
>
> << @C[ ^i; ^j; ^k; ^l ] = @A[ ^i; ^j ] * @B[ ^k; ^l ] >>
>
> is much better from a readability standpoint since the j's and k's are
> actually visible, but may be horrific from a parsing perspective.
Yeah, the sigils do get in the way for small placeholder variables like
these.
 @C[ $i; $j; $k; $l ] = @A[ $i; $j ] * @B[ $k; $l ] Â
Losing the carets doesn't do much for us (and would force us to use the
explicit syntax, whatever that might be). Hmm, on the other hand, ^
doesn't mean anything in term context yet. I feel uncomfortable about
allowing ^ as a shorthand for $^, since every other variable in the
whole damn language has one of the four standard sigils.
Luke
