Re: [stack] Advantages of cat, joy ..?

On Feb 23, 2009, at 6:59 PM, chris glur wrote:

>>> In practice, I think a lot of the extra surface area (redundancy,
>>> delimiters, grammatical rules) that is built into popular  
>>> programming
>>> languages (as well as natural writing systems), is there to serve  
>>> the human
>>> mind.
>
> Yes, of course, and what could be more important ?

Correctness?


> OK, reading further is this tread, I realise there's been a big
> misunderstanding, I agree 'natural languages are the worst disaster
> ito [in terms of] complexity. I meant that we should build on
> the existing human/sociatal assets, eg.:
> * use already existing knowledge - call a 'tail' a "tail" and not
>   a "cdr"

Most of us already do that. "cdr" made perfectly good sense to early
Lispers as "contents of decrement register," but, I agree, "tail" would
have been better even then.


>  work left to right, top to bottom:

Ah, so your "existing human/societal assets" refers to only those of
the Western Hemisphere.

>  '7 -> counter' is better than counter := 7

But then how do you indicate a pointer? An arrow makes perfect
sense for a pointer, no? Counter <- 7 could work though, since our
already existing convention is for the variable to be on the left.


> * iteration is more 'natural' than recursion - all things being
>   equal ..........

Only for someone not used to thinking recursively. In many cases
though, iteration is less resource hungry. Of course, modern
languages already convert recursion to iteration in those cases.
--
don