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It's perfectly possible to express solutions at a high level without much regard for formal semantics. Knuth's The Art of Computer Programming expresses most o
by mbrubeck 17y ago
It's perfectly possible to express solutions at a high level without much regard for formal semantics. Knuth's The Art of Computer Programming expresses most of its algorithms in a combination of informal English and ad-hoc pseudocode. It's usually not difficult to translate them into languages with semantics varying from machine code to Haskell.
- gdp 17y agoI didn't say "formal semantics", I said "fixed semantics", as in "something you understand and can apply consistently within a context". Within the context of a single code-fragment, the semantics are not changing. They might change from example to example, but that's perfectly reasonable. My assertion is that when people say "I think in pseudo-code", they actually mean "an idealised version of language X", where language X is some paradigm or language they understand well. I just wrote a blog post about this very subject, based on the flood of comments (shameless self-promotion follows): http://news.ycombinator.org/item?id=802780 http://news.ycombinator.org/item?id=802780