Re: Ada generics

[Georg Bauhaus <bauhaus@arcor.de>]

On Tue, 2007-01-02 at 14:51 +0100, Dmitry A. Kazakov wrote:

> Come on, why on earth "water" is a descriptive name of water.

"Water" is a descriptive name in the context of a program
using "water" as an identifier. We rely on readers to be able
to give meaning to "water". (Fortunately, we are not forced
to write "WATER" all the time.)

>  I find "вода"
> far more descriptive! (:-))

I wouldn't hesitate to write "вода" in a Russian only program.
In fact, when I translated UI messages for the Serna XML editor
from English into German, it was helpful being able to look
into a Russian dictionary. The developers are from Russia,
and in a few cases the Russian translation of the UI messages 
had good hints to the intended meaning of the English phrases.

>  Natural language words (even pictographs)
> describe absolutely nothing but themselves. 

(How can you be certain of this? :-)

> > Programming problems cannot reasonably described in full
> > using only formal symbolism.
> 
> So what?

It means a programming language should enable its users to choose
good names. To me, this means reasonable flexibility in the choice
of identifiers. We are not yet used to writing π in a geometry program
even though it is an obvious choice for all involved. A few decades
ago, People weren't expecting to be able to write A := {1, 3 .. 15}
when using SETL. They instead had to revert to trigraphs for the
braces and such, IIRC. This has changed. So maybe some day Ada
programmers will be fine with Greek π in geometry programs,
and use ω occasionally, for local variables that have to do with
spinning things.

> The language treats *any* names
> equally. Any application domain meaning of names is outside the language.

I don't think application domain names can be chosen properly if
you won't let application domains influence language design,
including identifier spelling rules (in say 5% of future
programs if Randy's estimates will turn out to be true).


> >> 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,
> 
> Mathematicians use much less descriptive identifies being absolutely free
> to use Latin, Greek and Hebrew alphabets. Yet nobody even tried to use full
> words. Why?

Mathematicians use full words almost all the time when they
explain their reasoning to human readers. 

echo "Let I ⊂ N be a finite index set. For all k ∈ I, P(k)." | wc
      1      15      58

cat | wc
for k in I loop
   assert(P(k));
end loop;
      3       8      43

How many math books or papers are there that use a more terse
mode of expression?

> Yet another "German" rule: "a_b" = "ab"? In that spirit, what about
> middle-endian integer literals and postfix forms for all function calls?
> (:-))

These are not character set and casing issues, and you know it. :-)