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Typing is not such a big issue. I mean, many languages require many more symbols than keys on a keyboard, and are used every day by millions of people who are n
by cdavid 16y ago
Typing is not such a big issue. I mean, many languages require many more symbols than keys on a keyboard, and are used every day by millions of people who are not programmers and without any particular technical skill (think Japanese and Chinese).
Practically, having to regularly deal with Japanese encoding, a big issue is interoperability. Granted, a lot of issues are caused by not using unicode (unix vs windows encodings which sadly are still pervasive), and those could be mitigated by enforcing unicode.
I am not so much concerned about readability: mathematics go away with tons and tons of symbols, and it is not really ambiguous - certainly less so than most programming language syntaxes I know.
- omaranto 16y agoMathematics, like most languages meant for humans, is ambiguous -- maybe less than most, though. Programming languages are so unambiguous, on the other hand, that not only people but even computers can understand them!
- cdavid 16y agoWhat's ambiguous about mathematical notation ?
- pbhjpbhj 16y ago[1,2] Meaning?
- cdavid 16y agoWell, what does a + b means in C++ ? You are playing with the work meaning here. Of course, the syntax of a language is well defined - because it needs to be parsed, hopefully somewhat unambiguously by compiler/interpreter. But that's not very interesting, because that's not really how we program, at least not anymore: you write something to be read by other people more than something to be understood by computer, and two equivalent programs are often not equivalent at all in readability. So maybe my choice of words was not optimal, and I should have chosen readability instead of ambiguity. I think the focus on being executable by the computer is the wrong one. That's the trivial part.
- simonb 16y agohttp://sandersn.com/blog//index.php/2008/06/06/math_notation_is_terrible http://sandersn.com/blog//index.php/2008/06/06/math_notation...