> > are equivalent, so why is it that so many of us have learned to > feel more comfortable with > > foo > 100 > > than > > 100 < foo > > in our programs? Is it because our "natural language" habits make > us subconsciously think of the expresson (s) above as being more > about FOO as the subject of the sentence, rather than about the > relationship between two equally- important values?
I think it's because with foo you've assigned a value to something, in doing so you are implicitly stating that foo is the more important element. I may also be wrong about this but it seems to me that with iterative languages it's a little more natural to use >, and with functional languages a little more natural to test if the value is <. This is probably just a habit I have, but with recursion I tend to subtract (I don't know why, but I've noticed it). So you have a greater feeling of naturalness in your example because the first element is one assigned a value by the programmer, whereas the second is intrinsically valued. If one had foo > bar and foo < bar then I start thinking, we're gonna be looping, and we're gonna be recursing in turn, and the naturalness of the examples depends on how I think of using the language. This however is probably a really weird personal idiosyncracy. -- To unsubscribe from this list, just send an email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with unsubscribe as the subject.
