Re: Ada generics

[Georg Bauhaus <bauhaus@arcor.de>]

On Tue, 2007-01-02 at 12:11 +0100, Dmitry A. Kazakov wrote:
 
> > Should we deny problem domain facts just so that we have very
> > simple rules for parsers? Where German is written, there is a
> > simple rule: For writing "ß" in upper case, use "SS".
> 
> This is not a domain of the programming language,

Programming languages use natural language words for good
reasons, for example, because we can think and communicate
more clearly referring to things using descriptive names.
Programming problems cannot reasonably described in full
using only formal symbolism.
Why give up descriptive names just because natural language
words can be slightly more difficult to parse than words
tailored to the needs of the most stupid computer programs?

>  but one of the natural
> language. Somebody was too lazy to write 'sz' and invented a digraph 'ß'.

'ß' is just the concatenation of long s and short s. You will
find long s in old English, too. Strictly, 'Sz' was hardly ever
written, neither was 'zz' as in "wazzer" instead of "wasser" (water).
The rule is: 'ß' becomes 'SS' in upper case. Other languages have
different rules, but they have rules, too.

> Others in other natural languages might come (and did) to even more crazy
> ideas like "don't" = "do not". Why should that bother us?
> 
> > That's not too hard a challenge to computer science in my view,
> > but I'll leave that to psychologists to answer when it comes
> > to the views of actual computer scientists. :-)
> 
> Simplicity of implementation does not justify doing wrong things! (:-))

Indeed, this is why I like to be able to write identifiers
that are written correctly, and not wrong just because we are
given only 7bit-ASCII identifiers as written in
Computeranglosaxonian. :-)