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Dijkstra's quote sounds more like an argument for defaulting to immutability than anything about syntactic abstractions. (I happen to agree with him, there.)
by silentbicycle 17y ago
Dijkstra's quote sounds more like an argument for defaulting to immutability than anything about syntactic abstractions. (I happen to agree with him, there.)
- dman 17y ago"to make the correspondence between the program (spread out in text space) and the process (spread out in time) as trivial as possible". Most programmers read programs as plain source most of the time, ie not as macroexpanded source. If editors showed macroexpanded source code by default, things would be different. Also macroexpansion does in practice affect the ability of the compiler to highlight what line caused the error, or the ability to step through code intuitively (you are stepping through macroexpanded code and sometimes its tiresome to be able to intuitively understand how that relates to code that you wrote).