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Ken Iverson wrote an interesting document, "Notation as a tool of thought", which covers his thoughts on what a concise/efficient notation provides: http://www.
by doublec 13y ago
Ken Iverson wrote an interesting document, "Notation as a tool of thought", which covers his thoughts on what a concise/efficient notation provides: http://www.jsoftware.com/papers/tot.htm http://www.jsoftware.com/papers/tot.htm
- Locke1689 13y agoReally, interesting, thank you! The one worry I have with APL and its descendants is that its conciseness will encourage people to make overly long expressions. One possibly beneficial side-effect of more verbose languages is that it tends to encourage the use of additional identifiers to hold sub-expressions. The act of naming things is often a good thing for both the authors and readers of a program. More abstractly, it allows the program to carry intentional semantics alongside operational semantics. This is also a problem I have with mathematics -- mathematical notation often uses context-dependent single-letter variable names for semantic information, which is terrible from an outsider's perspective (and by outsider I really mean anyone who isn't working in the exact field of the mathematician). Edit: I should mention that I'm still pretty enamored with J for numerical computation, even though I never do any of it :)
- gruseom 13y agoIf you like the Iverson, don't miss the famous piece of Whitehead's where he talks about notation too: http://introtologic.info/AboutLogicsite/whitehead%20Good%20Notation.html http://introtologic.info/AboutLogicsite/whitehead%20Good%20N... Iverson took one of his epigraphs from there, but the whole thing is short and well worth reading. Fun fact: Iverson, Roger Hui (the J guy) and Arthur Whitney (the K guy) were all from Alberta.
- Locke1689 13y agoMore sources for thoughts about designing descriptive but efficient language notation: brilliant! Upvotes all around! :)