Re: F9X twister & ADA (was: n-dim'l vectors)

["James Giles" <jamesgiles@worldnet.att.net>]

Dale Stanbrough wrote in message ...
>James Gilesm wrote:
>
>> It's very BAD language design to use the same keywords for
>> several distinct language features.
>
>I'm sorry but i would have to strongly disagree here. People
>are masters at contextual interpretation of the semantics of
>words. There are so many words in English that are decoded
>based on context (even pronunciation!) that I doubt this is
>really an issue.

You are welcome to disagree.  But, conclusions drawn from how
people use natural languages are not necessarily even applicable
to programming languages.  The reason that people get by
with multiple meanings, and manage to extract the meaning anyway,
is that natural languages are quite verbose and contain lots of
redundancies (which give extra clues) and people can ask for
something to be restated if it's not clear.

In programming languages, syntax with multiple different meanings
often leads to long learning curves for the language.  And (at least
in the case of C, with which I'm more familiar) it can lead to subtle
bugs that are hard to find and correct.  Most language designers
will avoid such whenever possible.  Since programming languages
are much smaller than natural languages, it's nearly *always* possible
to avoid lots of distinct uses for any given syntax.  There's no need
to ever introduce an opportunity for confusion.

--
J. Giles