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Unfortunately life is complex and all of those semantics are useful. You have to read and write documentation and follow well established conventions (like math
by whiterknight 3y ago
Unfortunately life is complex and all of those semantics are useful. You have to read and write documentation and follow well established conventions (like math).
- kibwen 3y agoBut that's the problem, even the mathematical operations in programming languages don't follow the established conventions of mathematics. And even mathematics overloads operators all the time to mean subtly different things. And even if it didn't, mathematics notation was optimized over centuries for terseness, not for readability, so optimizing programming languages for familiarity with mathematics is optimizing for the wrong thing anyway. We can do better than standard mathematic notation, and that "better" probably looks like "just use properly-named methods or functions that communicate their intent in plain English, not in forbidding moon-runes".
- whiterknight 3y agoThat’s my point. symbols and names are merely suggestive mnemonic devices. They can’t ever specify actual behaviors. Accept it and supplement with English. That’s what math does. You have to read the context. > optimized to tersness That is a form of readability. If you think there is a conflict you need to explain mathematicians wouldn’t care about readability.