🚀 go-pugleaf

bevan@cs.man.ac.uk (Stephen J Bevan) writes:
:    Despite what the CS gurus say, allowing the introduction of
:    additional functions is not the same thing.
: 
: Semantically it is, and that is what really counts.

Well that just about sums up the schism here. 

Scientist computer not bit one syntax about care.


: Some languages do allow you to define infix operators (Haskell and ML),
: but there are very few that allow you to define distfix syntax.
: Of those that do they are either quite old or designed for completely
: different purposes than numerical work.  Also a problem with distix is
: that it is very easy to get ambiguities and unless you are going to
: introduce some user defined precedence (which I'm not even sure would
: solve the problem), the only solution is to put parentheses around
: phrases.

Yeah, so deal with it!

:  Once you do this, you might as well be using a prefix or
: posfix only language.


:    Also, mathematicians and scientists are accustomed to using
:    whatever syntax they like, as long as it does not lead to confusion.
: 
: Confusion for who?  I get very confused when I read books that use
: |A| to mean three different things depending on the context (which
: isn't always immediately obvious).  With all due respect to
: mathematicians and scientists, just because they are accustomed to
: creating syntax on the fly, it doesn't meant that they are any good at
: it (where "good" is totally subjective, but I'll take it to mean that
: other people find it readable and better (another subjective term)
: than anything else).  For example, I'm sure Frege thought he had a
: great notation for his logical formulae, but IMHO (and with plenty of
: hindsight :-) it was needlessly complicated. 

I think it would be nice to "import" a set of syntax rules for whatever
particular domain you're using, so as to make programming in that domain
easiest.  It won't make compiler writing easiest, but then again, 
we have our biases, and we don't care that much how hard that task is.
:-)

: This extends to CS people as well, there seems to be something inside
: most of them that drives them to invent a "new" language even though
: it rarely has anything new in it.  It usually consists of a different
: permutation of symbols to describe the same semantics that underlies
: thousands of other languages. (There are a some languages that warrant
: the title "new", but they are very few and far between)

This is the singularity at the core of the problem.

Computer scientists have this bias that the choosing the 
particular permutation of symbols (how disparaging!) is either trivial
or irrelevant.

: bevan

--
-Matt Kennel  		mbk@inls1.ucsd.edu
-Institute for Nonlinear Science, University of California, San Diego
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