61–70 of 78 posts
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Syntax limits everything, it only becomes more important as you're doing hard things. Being able to fit 10% more code on screen is a lot like being 10% smarter, which is the kind of thing you need to make the hard problems even possible.
"Being able to fit 10% more code on screen is a lot like being 10% smarter" Makes me wonder how I ever wrote anything on a 80x24 serial terminal in the 1980s....
This particular April Fool's joke goes back at least 30 years. I remember getting a chuckle out of it a long time ago. For context for younger readers, it might be worth pointing out that there was for a while a sort of rivalry between C and Pascal adherents. C was the more "modern" and "professional" language, while Pascal was a "teaching" language (or so some of the arguments went). Windows was coded in C, while Ma…
You forgot that (object) Pascal found it's niche in Borlands excellent 'Delphi' product and that to this day it has its adherents. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Delphi_%28programming_language%... There is also: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_Pascal I've never used it but I've seen people using it and they were insanely productive and happy about the tools.
Normally, I tend to avoid using classical IDEs and prefer Emacs, so it took me a while to get comfortable with Delphi (the IDE). But once I had gotten used to that, I was able to jump right in, despite never having touched Pascal before. Pascal is certainly not the sexiest kind of language around, but it does make it easy to write highly readable code. I can see why people would want to stick to it.
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You could have called me a "Pascal devotee" back then, but I had eventually come to realize verbosity kills creativity and dumped Pascal for good. This { int a[10]; ... } wins over this begin var A: array[0..9] of Integer; ... end; quite simply because the latter takes longer to both read and write. The proof being that none of the more or less serious languages created in the past few decades dared to adopt e.g. beg…
> The proof being that none of the more or less serious languages created in the past few decades dared to adopt e.g. begin ... end again. facepalm Except Ruby, OCaml, Erlang, Lua, etc. Frankly, if verbosity is a significant limiting factor on your creativity, a) C is not the solution to your problem, and b) you weren't trying to solve any hard problems anyway. Seriously, if you're doing anything really hard, stuff l…
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And Python dumped even the { }; you can now pile any number of scope closings into a single newline.
I've been using mainly Python lately and I still find it weird. I miss my {} and ;.
But then I realized that Python only "forced" me to do things I would have done otherwise. I got used to its syntax rather quickly.
The one thing I like about using braces for delimiting blocks is that Emacs and Vi allow you to jump from the beginning of a block to the end (and vice versa) in one keystroke. But otherwise, I have to agree with Bjarne Stroustrup (sorry if I mis-spelled his name): Programmers can learn to love absolutely any syntax.
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By worse do you mean? #define new(x) (malloc(sizeof(x))) #define dispose(x) { if((x) != NULL) { free(x); } } C was so primitive already when compared against Turbo Pascal 6.0
Totally worse. free(NULL) preforms no action so there is no requirement for the if statement. ;)
This particular April Fool's joke goes back at least 30 years. I remember getting a chuckle out of it a long time ago. For context for younger readers, it might be worth pointing out that there was for a while a sort of rivalry between C and Pascal adherents. C was the more "modern" and "professional" language, while Pascal was a "teaching" language (or so some of the arguments went). Windows was coded in C, while Ma…
All the Pascal fanboys did this (and worse) before they gave in and finally converted :) #define begin { #define end }
This particular April Fool's joke goes back at least 30 years. I remember getting a chuckle out of it a long time ago. For context for younger readers, it might be worth pointing out that there was for a while a sort of rivalry between C and Pascal adherents. C was the more "modern" and "professional" language, while Pascal was a "teaching" language (or so some of the arguments went). Windows was coded in C, while Ma…
You forgot that (object) Pascal found it's niche in Borlands excellent 'Delphi' product and that to this day it has its adherents. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Delphi_%28programming_language%... There is also: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_Pascal I've never used it but I've seen people using it and they were insanely productive and happy about the tools.
He swore it was great though.
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> The proof being that none of the more or less serious languages created in the past few decades dared to adopt e.g. begin ... end again. facepalm Except Ruby, OCaml, Erlang, Lua, etc. Frankly, if verbosity is a significant limiting factor on your creativity, a) C is not the solution to your problem, and b) you weren't trying to solve any hard problems anyway. Seriously, if you're doing anything really hard, stuff l…
I agree. I don't understand the programmers who debate syntax all the time. Good syntax is important, but appropriate semantics are more important. Only after you've selected the typing, execution environment, memory model, paradigm support, available platforms, and libraries you need, should you worry about syntax. At that point there are usually 0 or 1 satisfactory languages.
By the time the equals sign was invented, it was commonplace to use the abbreviation "aeq." for equality, for "all equivalent (or equal) to".
But the equals sign turned out to be a really important development in mathematics, because it helped to visually distill mathematics down into just their number and equation components, without the visual noise of written words.
So I wouldn't be too quick to discount the value of good syntax. I've never personally cared much about it in the past, but looking at it from the point of view of the equals sign, it's probably fair to guess that syntax does a lot more for code clarity and readability than we think.
Wow, it's been a long time since I checked this joke for the last time! At that time I read the version that was translated into my mother tongue (Korean). Now I read this in its native form.
This particular April Fool's joke goes back at least 30 years. I remember getting a chuckle out of it a long time ago. For context for younger readers, it might be worth pointing out that there was for a while a sort of rivalry between C and Pascal adherents. C was the more "modern" and "professional" language, while Pascal was a "teaching" language (or so some of the arguments went). Windows was coded in C, while Ma…
I liked Modula 2 much more than Pascal or C. (for those, that don't know it:) Modula 2 was the successor of Pascal from Niklaus Wirth. It had cleaner syntax and many other good features. Its successor, Oberon, was object oriented. [1] But the culprit (and that belongs to all Pascal descendants, as it seems (at least until Modula 2)) was, that the libraries where not very helpful. The standard libraries for Pascal (no…