Re: Fun with C

[wilso <leon.winslow@notes.udayton.edu>]

On Sun, 17 Apr 2011 18:26:13 -0400, Georg Bauhaus  
<rm.dash-bauhaus@futureapps.de> wrote:

> On 4/17/11 9:35 PM, Elias Salomï¿œo Helou Neto wrote:
>
>> Someone has written a line of code without knowing what it does. Is it
>> a language problem? Not that C is spectacular, but blaming the
>> language here is not fair. Minimally competent C programmers do know
>> about such conversions.
>
> OK, that's a claim.  Michael Barr seem to have found results
> contradicting it if the "minimum" is what you minimally
> find with professional C programmers. In his netrino.com embedded
> C quiz, he found that US takers got at D+ on average.
> That's a real world, observable minimum, then.
>
> I suggest turning to observable facts and away from
> normative ontology for a moment.  Towards justifiable
> language design.
>
> Whenever a statistical phenomenon is observed,
> many start looking for correlations and hypotheses.
> Here, we have errors related to the / operation and
> the promotion rules of C's $6.3.1.  Is there a correlation?
> Will the correlation between error rates and language
> rules  be the same if using another language?
> Is that other language intrinsically better or worse, then?
>
> If there is a correlation between the frequency of a number
> of programming errors (in this case related to +,-,*,/ etc)
> and the way the corresponding part of the programming language
> is defined (in this case operand treatment), then I suggest
> the following
>
> Hypothesis 1:
>
> A language A is better designed than another B if,
> after comparable introduction to the languages,
> programmers of an A-group make fewer mistakes than
> programmers of a B-group when implementing the same
> algorithm.
>
> If so, then competent, informed language *design* will have to
> consider expected error rates when defining the language.
> Because the definitions affect error rates.
>
> A second perspective:
>
> Definition: The complexity of / (or another language feature) is
> the number of concepts that a human mind will have to connect
> properly in order to use / (or another language feature) correctly.
>
> Assumption:  Programming is a human activity.
> Since programs express human ideas, clear means of expression reflect
> programmer intentions better than formally implicit means that
> in addition depend on statements outside the language, as is the
> case with C's fundamental types.
>
> I suggest, then,
>
> Hypothesis 2:
>
> A language A is better designed than another B if an
> understanding and using the language properly is less complex,
> that is, in order to express the same algorithm,
>
> (a) it requires thinking about fewer interconnected, possibly
> implicit concepts and
>
> (b) depends less on statements outside the language.










a number of studies of this sort were done in the 70s.
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