3 ms·

> Imagine the second line being added in by your ide in a light gray. So what would be the benefit compared to just writing `plus reduce range 100`?

• DanielR31D 5y ago
  less keystrokes
  • leprechaun1066 5y ago
    And easier to spot patterns in the source files. Whether someone finds that beneficial or not is subjective I guess, but I think it's useful to be able to immediately recognise what something like +/! is doing whenever you see it in source after using it once or twice.
  • gjulianm 5y ago
    It's a very weak benefit. I don't know about you but most of my time programming is spent thinking about the program, not writing it. In fact, this would only increase the time I need to think about how to write things (what was the symbol for reduce again?)
• turbinerneiter 5y ago
  I'm not sure, but imagine once you learned it you parse the sentence like a word. Like some of the Asian alphabets?
• Firadeoclus 5y ago
  The benefit would be it being optional. You only need it while learning the language, whereas once you're familiar with the notation the terseness becomes a feature. Of course once you've come up with clear names for each symbol you could do the opposite, let the IDE turn `plus reduce range 100` into `+/!100`. But as long as IDEs are still glorified text editors and devs care about the representation that gets stored on disk I would argue making the terse notation the default is the right choice.