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No, because that makes it harder to understand what it's doing. Remember that programming languages are not learned at a very young age and continuously traine
by william42 15y ago
No, because that makes it harder to understand what it's doing. Remember that programming languages are not learned at a very young age and continuously trained for decades the way natural languages are.
- vorg 15y agoThe era of programming languages is only beginning, and perhaps within a generation or two programming languages will be learnt at a young age and continuously trained for decades. Perhaps there'll only be a small number of languages that people learn, so people will have a "native" programming language in the way people have a native natural language.
- chromatic 15y agoNo, because that makes it harder to understand what it's doing. Without looking at an example of working code, how is it possible to say that one particular phrasing is so obviously better than any other that it and it alone should be allowed to exist? I appreciate in Perl very much the postfix conditional expression syntax because it exploits the end weight linguistic property and allows me to emphasize the most important part of the statement when the situation warrants. I believe that makes my code clearer because it looks different from the Algol-standard conditional syntax.
- vorg 15y ago> Perl ... allows me to emphasize the most important part of the statement when the situation warrants. Yes. The ordering of elements in a sentence is its "thematic" structure, just as important in communicating as the "transitive" structure of sentences, i.e the relationship between nouns, verbs, etc. Most programming languages copy the transitive structure of natural languages, but not many allow the programmer to freely choose the thematic structure.