>>>>> "Schwab,Wilhelm" == Schwab,Wilhelm K <[email protected]> writes:
Wilhelm> Lack of precedence *is* a weakness of the language and Wilhelm> ridiculing someone who cites it won't help anything. Until you're able to reframe it as a problem of familiarity. Sure, most people learned programming (and algebra) with precedence rules. But precedence is not inherently the most natural thing. And this is what you must make clear. Look at the contortions that happen when you have a language that has either user-defined operators (prolog comes to mind) or just a hella lotta levels (Perl has 40 levels of precedence). The point is that you *cannot*, even as a reasonably intelligent human being, parse such languages *locally* to tell what the order of ops are. You *must* consult something external, which can be pretty crazy if it means hunting through source code instead of just looking it up on a ref card. Smalltalk's way is very simple. Sure, it's not optimized for the most common case (multiplication over addition), but it's optimized for *all* the other cases. -- Randal L. Schwartz - Stonehenge Consulting Services, Inc. - +1 503 777 0095 <[email protected]> <URL:http://www.stonehenge.com/merlyn/> Smalltalk/Perl/Unix consulting, Technical writing, Comedy, etc. etc. See http://methodsandmessages.vox.com/ for Smalltalk and Seaside discussion _______________________________________________ Pharo-project mailing list [email protected] http://lists.gforge.inria.fr/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/pharo-project
