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From: ok@quintus.UUCP (Richard A. O'Keefe)
Newsgroups: comp.lang.ada
Subject: Re: Typing Ada
Message-ID: <1017@cresswell.quintus.UUCP>
Date: 25 May 88 05:53:56 GMT
References: <12400764147.13.RCONN@SIMTEL20> <25135.580491166@mbunix>
Organization: Quintus Computer Systems, Mountain View, CA
List-Id: <comp.lang.ada>

In article <25135.580491166@mbunix>, munck@MITRE-BEDFORD.ARPA (Bob Munck) writes:
> People can "read"
> pictures better than words in a row; machines, until recently, couldn't
> do anything at all with pictures and could handle only very simple
> sequences of words (programming languages).  I think it likely that Ada
> will be the LAST major one-dimensional programming language.

People can read *some* *small* pictures better than they can read text
conveying the same information.  But it doesn't seem plausible to me that
a program which would have been say 50k lines of ADA would be easy to
follow as a collection of several thousand pictures.  (Compare the
information density of a paperback detective story with the information
density of a comic.)  I would like to see some evidence one way or the
other about the practicality of pictorial systems -vs- structured text
for non-trivial applications (e.g. if the whole thing can fit on a SUN
screen, forget it).