Re: [OT] interesting reason why a language is considered good

[Georg Bauhaus <rm.dash-bauhaus@futureapps.de>]

On 16.04.12 15:06, Dmitry A. Kazakov wrote:
> On Mon, 16 Apr 2012 13:48:04 +0200, Georg Bauhaus wrote:
> 
>> On 16.04.12 12:43, Marius Amado-Alves wrote:
>>> Love OT threads in this clever forum:-)
>>>
>>> Actually there is a bit of thruth in the absurd no keyword thing:
>>> *many* keywords can get in the way of naming identifiers. Ada, for one,
>>> has a bit too many keywords, with some good identifier candidates (when,
>>> others...)
>>
>> "when" and "others" are general abstractions. What kind
>> of programs will in effect be about general abstractions?
> 
> The kind of programs in Ada language, which uses exactly these words.

And these are? (If you could avoid the tautological void.
Be constructive! ;-)

> Your 
> argument is bogus. If a reserved word is good for the language then it is 
> good for a program in that language.

If a reserved word is good for the language, then it is a general
abstraction, such as "when", or "others", because is it applicable to
all kinds of programs regardless of concrete notions. The word
"Morning" or "brothers" are not applicable to all kinds of programs
because they are very unlike "when" or "others". I bet the former
words are not reserved by any programming language.

Amado-Alves claimed that "when" and "others" show that the number
of reserved words in Ada is too large, because they are good
candidates for identifiers. I still only see the same claim repeated,
but not substantiated, and compared on a scale of "understandability".

> Furthermore if "when" is bad, then "what", "who" etc should be too. Yet, 
> they are not reserved.

More often than I like, I translate programs that use overly
general identifiers, words that can only be understood after an inordinate
amount of study. "What" as an identifier shouldn't be, IMHO,
reserved or not, so words like "what" not being reserved does
not count as counter-argument in my book. I'd rather have a
list of words not recommended to augment reserved words.


> The purpose of words being reserved has nothing to do with words. It does 
> 1) with readability, to clearly separate identifiers from other syntactic 
> tokens in order to improve readability.
> 
> The reason #1 does not stand anymore because programs are read in IDEs.

I disagree strongly, likely because IDEs usually become only DEs for
heterogeneous sources in my real world: IDEs typically
lack reliable means of automatically mapping (possibly broken)
source to and from foreign layout, but layout becomes essential if
syntax is abandoned for readability. Moreover, I happen to work in
an environment that requires the use of editors (and terminals)
that happen to be available with a given foreign system. My work
can become rather difficult when programmers have relied on
"graphical" or "typographical" properties of some IDE, and not
plain old syntax.