Re: Problems of Symbol Congestion in Computer Languages

> From: rantingrick > Anyone with half a brain understands the metric system is far > superior (on many levels) then any of the other units of > measurement. Anyone with a *whole* brain can see that you are mistaken. The current "metric" system has two serious flaws: It's based on powers of ten

No-syntax Web-programming-IDE (was: Does turtle graphics have the wrong associations?)

> >>> My proposed no-syntax > >>> IDE *also* gets rid of the need to bother with any programming-language > >>> syntax. I've been proposing it for years, but nobody has shown any > >>> interest > From: Terry Reedy > What you describe below is similar to various systems that have > been proposed an

Re: Does turtle graphics have the wrong associations?

> > My proposed no-syntax > > IDE *also* gets rid of the need to bother with any programming-language > > syntax. I've been proposing it for years, but nobody has shown any > > interest > From: Steven D'Aprano > I'm interested. No-syntax IDE? How is this even possible? I guess you missed what I p

Re: Does turtle graphics have the wrong associations?

> > Who is your target audience? > From: "Alf P. Steinbach" > Someone intelligent who doesn't know anything or very much about > programming and wants to learn general programming. I think of what a computer *does* as data processing, and then programing is simply telling the computer what data p

Re: what's so difficult about namespace?

> From: Kaz Kylheku <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> > Scheme hasn't officially supported breaking a program into > multiple files until R6RS. If the language is defined in terms of > one translation unit, it doesn't make sense to have a namespace > feature. Good point. Note that any language that uses optiona

Re: The Importance of Terminology's Quality

> From: George Neuner <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> > A friend of mine had an early 8080 micros that was programmed > through the front panel using knife switches When you say "knife switches", do you mean the kind that are shaped like flat paddles? I think that would be the IMSAI, which came after the ALTA

Re: The Importance of Terminology's Quality

> From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] (Rob Warnock) > In the LGP-30, they used hex addresses, sort of[1], but the > opcodes (all 16 of them) had single-letter mnemonics chosen so that > the low 4 bits of the character codes *were* the correct nibble for > the opcode! ;-} That's a fascinating design constrain

Re: The Importance of Terminology's Quality

John W Kennedy <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: JWK> Into the 60s, indeed, there were still machines being made JWK> that had no instruction comparable to the mainframe BASx/BALx JWK> family, or to Intel's CALL. You had to do a subprogram call by JWK> first overwriting the last instruction of what you we

Re: The Importance of Terminology's Quality

> >> ... the "thunks" were necessary at the machine-language level to > >> /implement/ ALGOL 60, but they could not be expressed /in/ ALGOL. > > Ah, thanks for the clarification. Is that info in the appropriate > > WikiPedia page? If not, maybe you would edit it in? > From: John W Kennedy <[EMAIL P

Re: The Importance of Terminology's Quality

Why this response is so belated: = > Date: Tue, 24 Jun 2008 18:42:15 -0400 > From: John W Kennedy <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> > ... the "thunks" were necessary at the machine-language level to > /implement/ ALGOL 60,

Re: The Importance of Terminology's Quality

Why this response is so belated: = > Date: Thu, 5 Jun 2008 06:17:01 -0700 (PDT) > From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] > P.S. Please don't look at my profile (at google groups), thanks! Please don't look at the orange an

Re: The Importance of Terminology's Quality

Why this response is so belated: = > Date: Thu, 05 Jun 2008 11:37:48 +0100 > From: Jon Harrop <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> > We all know that Java, Perl, Python and Lisp suck. Well at least you're three-quarters corr

Re: The Importance of Terminology's Quality

> From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] (David Combs) > Lisp is *so* early a language (1960?), preceeded mainly only by > Fortran (1957?)?, and for sure the far-and-away the first as a > platform for *so many* concepts of computer-science, eg lexical vs > dynamic ("special") variables, passing *unnamed* function

Re: The Importance of Terminology's Quality

> From: "[EMAIL PROTECTED]" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> > the importance of naming of functions. I agree, that's a useful consideration in the design of any system based on keywords, such as names of functions or operators. (I'm not using "keyword" in the sense of a symbol in the KEYWORD package.) > the