From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 X-Spam-Checker-Version: SpamAssassin 3.4.4 (2020-01-24) on polar.synack.me X-Spam-Level: X-Spam-Status: No, score=-0.3 required=5.0 tests=BAYES_00, REPLYTO_WITHOUT_TO_CC autolearn=no autolearn_force=no version=3.4.4 X-Google-Language: ENGLISH,ASCII-7-bit X-Google-Thread: 103376,4961da398a273222 X-Google-Attributes: gid103376,public X-Google-ArrivalTime: 1995-02-08 16:27:07 PST Path: nntp.gmd.de!news.rwth-aachen.de!newsserver.rrzn.uni-hannover.de!aix11.hrz.uni-oldenburg.de!uniol!zib-berlin.de!news.mathworks.com!zombie.ncsc.mil!news.duke.edu!agate!news.Stanford.EDU!CSD-NewsHost!rogoff From: rogoff@sccm.Stanford.EDU (Brian Rogoff) Newsgroups: comp.lang.ada Subject: Re: Ada self-referential operators Date: 8 Feb 95 09:04:24 Organization: /u/rogoff/.organization Message-ID: References: <3gnkjb$gso@miranda.gmrc.gecm.com> <3grqrf$jkd@gnat.cs.nyu.edu> Reply-To: rogoff@sccm.stanford.edu NNTP-Posting-Host: sccm.stanford.edu In-reply-to: jgv@swl.msd.ray.com's message of Wed, 8 Feb 1995 02:06:54 GMT Date: 1995-02-08T09:04:24+00:00 List-Id: John G. Volan writes: I never cease to be amazed (and disgusted) at how enamored some people in this industry seem to be about using arbitrary sequences of special characters for just about everything under the sun. Who says it's *desirable* to load up a language with a lot of cryptic "mathematicalese"? Doesn't anyone remember how *hard* it was to learn math, way back in grade school? In some problem domains it is very useful to have concise operators. MATLAB, for example, even makes up new "YAFOs" to represent common matrix manipulations. While I agree that overuse of special operators could lead to highly unreadable code, tasteful use of such operators makes reading math, and by extension, mathematical code, easier (IMO). People could also choose bad names for functions and variables and make code unreadable that way, yet I've never heard it suggested that we should program in the untyped lambda calculus! IMHO, the operators that Ada currently supplies ought to be considered a grudging concession to the algebraic indoctrination we all suffered as children. The only reason they are there at all is because they've been beaten into our heads for so long that it is impossible to escape them. The last thing they should be viewed as is as a precedent for yet more operators. Eiffel 3 allows one to make up new "binary operator" names, although without true function overloading this is probably not too complicated. Any Eiffelists feel that this is bad/good? Also, I am pretty sure that Axiom, and probably other computer math systems, aloow one to define new operators. Maybe it's just something that math folks like? -- Brian