Re: OT: Programming Languages (Was: Spell Checking for Non European Languages, and for Conlangs)
| From: | Mark J. Reed <markjreed@...> |
|---|
| Date: | Wednesday, March 31, 2004, 2:29 |
|---|
On Wed, Mar 31, 2004 at 02:12:39AM +0100, And Rosta wrote:
> Being a syntactician and not a programmer, I wonder why programmers
> don't use trees. An interface like the one used for Windows directory
> structure (where you click on nodes to expand and contract them) seems
> ideal. Surely programmers can't be guilty of a kind of cerebrally
> masochistic machismo?
Are the speakers of the world gulity of cerebrally masochistic machismo
for not speaking in trees? For not using trees for all written
communication? Should we use clickable TreeViews to construct
our email messages?
Programming languages are, first and foremost, languages. They exist to
communicate - between people and other people at least as much as
between people and computers. Most translation of program into
executable code involves a tree representation at some point in the
process, and the Lisp syntax that people have been talking about is
fundamentally tree-based. But clicking around with a mouse would be
a very inefficient way of programming.
-Mark
Reply