(below message was bounced to me due without being sent to the list due to a membership error that I have since corrected)
From: John Pane <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> To: [email protected] Russel, Part of an experiment I did during my Ph.D. research looked at the readability of unless clauses at the beginning or end of a statement. Users were significantly more accurate when the clause was at the end. See: http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~pane/VL2000.html John On Sep 6, 2008, at 2:07 AM, Russel Winder wrote: > There is currently a big debate in the Groovy mailing list about > introducing: > > <expression> if <condition> > and > <expression> unless <condition> > > constructs into the language. Anyone familiar with Perl or Ruby will > have come across this "condition after expression" construct. In Perl > and Ruby these are additional selection constructs to the ones found > in > Fortran, Algol68, Pascal, C, C++, Java, Python, Groovy, and of course > Perl and Ruby: > > if <condition> <expression> > and > if <condition> <expression> else <expression> > > though in some languages the expressions are statement, but that is > technical detail. > > As you can image the debate is between the yes and no camp :-) Some > of > the arguments are about consistency and minimalism which are fairly > objective ones, but many of the arguments are about readability and > comprehension, which is of course where PPIG comes in. Many of the > arguments people are putting forward on readability and comprehension > are based simply on personal experience and prejudice. What I would > like to do is to introduce an element of science to the debate. For > this I need experimental data and input from psychology about > readability and comprehensibility. > > So does anyone know of any work on readability and comprehensibility > of > these two varieties of selection structure. > > Thanks. > > -- > Russel. > ==================================================== > Dr Russel Winder t: +44 20 7585 2200 > 41 Buckmaster Road m: +44 7770 465 077 > London SW11 1EN, UK w: http://www.russel.org.uk/
