🚀 go-pugleaf

On 9 Dec 90 02:56:19 GMT, poser@csli.Stanford.EDU (Bill Poser) said:

In article <16799@csli.Stanford.EDU> poser@csli.Stanford.EDU (Bill
Poser) writes:

poser> Regarding Piercarlo Grandi's argument that programming notation
poser> should differ as much as possible from mathematical notation,
poser> I am not terribly sympathetic.

I am afraid that you like Jim Giles did not understand my argument -- it
was not "since maths and programming are so different the notations
should be different as well", but "since maths and programming are so
different, similarity of notation is irrelevant and possibly even a trap
for the unwary".

I am not advocating pursuing difference of notation as a benefit; I am
saying that it should not be seen as an advantage of Fortran, and if it
seen as such, this may indicate little awareness of the immense
difference therein. Hey, Mathematica (as somebody remarked) has an even
more maths like notation than Fortran, but this does not mean that the
semantics of those operations are the same (at least in the numerical
domain -- as to the symbolic one Mathematics used to have several bugs
:->).

poser> I suspect that this will just make people spend their time
poser> learning the funny new notation, not make them think harder about
poser> how actual digital computation differs from symbolic or ideal
poser> continuous numerical computation.

Oh yes, I can accept that. After all one of my alternatives to Fortran
was C++, because of its abstraction capabilities; one can use them to
create even more faithful reproduction of maths like notation, even if
again I think it is pointless.


poser> So, no, I'm not advocating gratuitious differences, just
poser> suggesting: (a) that Fortran and C are not very different in this
poser> respect; (b) that these differences probably don't matter very
poser> much.

Notation is usually not that important, as long as it helps work instead
of hindering it, understanding the issues is. Maybe a noation that does
not resemble traditional notation helps more understand that the
semantics do not resemble traditional semantics, maybe not.

--
Piercarlo Grandi                   | ARPA: pcg%uk.ac.aber.cs@nsfnet-relay.ac.uk
Dept of CS, UCW Aberystwyth        | UUCP: ...!mcsun!ukc!aber-cs!pcg
Penglais, Aberystwyth SY23 3BZ, UK | INET: pcg@cs.aber.ac.uk