Re: newbie can't get exceptions to work!

[Brian Rogoff <bpr@shell5.ba.best.com>]

On Tue, 10 Apr 2001, Robert A Duff wrote:
> 
> > Brian Rogoff <bpr@shell5.ba.best.com> writes:
> > > On Mon, 9 Apr 2001, Ted Dennison wrote:
> > > > That being the case, you'd like to strive for readability, not tersenes.
> > > 
> > > False dichotomy. In many cases, terse notation is more readable. 
> > > 
> > > Besides, I imagine English keywords, rather than French, German, Chinese,
> > > or Hindi, were chosen for some reason. 
> 
> Umm, surely Ada keywords are in English because the design of Ada was
> done for the United States Department of Defense, which tends to use
> English (or at least a dialect of it).  It doesn't mean English is
> "better" than anything else.

Ummm, surely I know that's the case. The point is that if people are
familiar with a particular notation for a simple concept like a delimiter, 
they'll be able to read it, keyword or no, begin end, {}, if-fi do-od
case-esac, (), etc. 

> If I design a programming language, the keywords will be in English,
> because that's all I know (unfortunately).

But, as you suggested earlier, superficial similarity to C syntax may be 
advantageous for the purposes of achieving poularity. I'm arguing that
that is not horrible. 

-- Brian