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The nuances of a given spoken language take years to master even with regular use. They are used for brevity, cultural identification, conveying meanings that a
by cynicalkane 13y ago
The nuances of a given spoken language take years to master even with regular use. They are used for brevity, cultural identification, conveying meanings that are often different from the dictionary definitions, many other things that programmers don't need to do. Much lawyer and engineering jargon is motivated behind removing these nuances.
You don't need nuances for a language to be expressive. Haskell is a formally rigid language that can express many things in a billion ways. Python is a simple language that accomplishes the same effect. Clojure has almost no syntax but is more expressive than almost any language I've seen. I don't want nuance in my programming languages. Nuance is how you get write-once source files and migrane-inducing bugs.
- chromatic 13y agoI don't want nuance in my programming languages. Does your programming language distinguish between period, semicolon, and colon? Are = and == separate operators? Is whitespace sometimes insignificant and other times significant?
- andrewflnr 13y agoDistinguishing lexical tokens is a red herring. Nuance has more to do with giving multiple meanings to tokens, depending on context, like maybe if the colon also worked as a statement terminator, but with slightly different semantics.
- Mithaldu 13y agoSo, you're saying: > Is whitespace sometimes insignificant and other times significant? (Yes, there are languages where whitespace is ALWAYS insiginificant. Well, that is unless you tell the parser to treat it as significant. Or a construct in the parser temporarily enables significance of whitespace.)
- pessimizer 13y agoDistinctness isn't a synonym for nuance. All programming languages that I'm aware of also distinguish between "toast" and "taste", or "4567" and "4587."
- chromatic 13y agoMaybe so, but some programming languages have case insensitive keywords or identifiers, or take into account only the first several letters of a keyword or identifier. Distinctness is nuanced too.