Re: Re: S-expressions

On Wed, Aug 06, 2003 at 05:04:41PM -0400, Aryeh M. Friedman wrote:

> > If yuo want to wash away the minor unnecessary annoyances extraneous to the
> > actual coding process, and watch them vanish down the metaphorical drain, the
> > kitchen sink can be pretty useful (:
> 
> 	If you can't tell if something is syntatically correct by reading it on
> a print out (no color coding or other tricks) then the language is not clean
> peroid.  Have we come so far we don't trust our own eyes?

The whole point with Syntax Highlighting (which doesn't mean lots of color on
the screen, btw; a2ps does a great job of printing all keywords in bold) is
that the human vision is not only eyes.

We don't read words by reading the letters of them but we read words by
"patterns" of characters. This process is supported by a subconscious knowledge
of possible words that can follow at a certain point.

So most of the time, we don't decipher single characters but we do pattern
matching at a very high level (which is why it is so hard to spot typos).

Syntax highlighting helps a lot here because it creates large classes for
things which we don't have to read. I've coded so much that I tend to ignore
all the boldface words in my IDEs (keywords) because I "know" what must be
standing there. When I scan over the text, I skip over these words completely.

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