3 ms·
There's more to it; making whitespace significant makes it harder to read in print and when presented with non-monospace fonts on-screen. Even without these cav
by pierrebai 10y ago
There's more to it; making whitespace significant makes it harder to read in print and when presented with non-monospace fonts on-screen. Even without these caveat, it's still a bit harder to visually process. It's like the = vs == problems. It's easy to get right, you almost always get it right, but it's close enough to cause errors and requires extra concentration effort.
Other lisp-ism: gratuitous abbreviations. Is 'lam' instead of 'lambda'. Given its teaching claim, that's two layer of understanding required of students: to know what a lamba is and to connect that lam stands for lambda.
- Avshalom 10y agoit's kind of interesting because originally my comment was a stronger defense of hyphens then when I compared it to Case sensitivity I actually back tracked. Ada for instance specifically considered then rejected case sensitivity because they had a (at least one) study that said case sensitivity was a source of errors. I don't know how well instrumented the pyret courses are but I would be very if they have studies on this.
- skrishnamurthi 10y agoPyret's implementation is by design very privacy-preserving (we don't just quietly make a copy of everybody's code, people have to explicitly share copies — we don't want to freak out students by surveilling them). But we do have some data that students have given us. In those data, we do not find evidence of case-sensitivity being a problem.