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

["Dmitry A. Kazakov" <mailbox@dmitry-kazakov.de>]

On Mon, 16 Apr 2012 17:01:05 +0200, Georg Bauhaus wrote:

> 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! ;-)

All Ada programs that use the case-statement.

>> 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.

=> it is bad to use in all programs => it is bad for the language in which
all these programs are written. q.e.d.

> 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.

What about the words "return", "range", "abs", "tagged"?

> 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.

Surely "when" and "at" are prefect names for a formal parameter of the type
Time.

Also your argument to universality would also apply to the parameters named
"X", "Y", "Left", "Right" all over the LRM. It did not work there, but
suddenly does for "when"?

>> 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.

So either they must be reserved or your argument is wrong. The choice is
yours.

>> 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.

Statistically irrelevant. Probably there exist Ada programmers using
typewriter without characters |, #, " (See Ada 83 RM 2.10). Don't care!

-- 
Regards,
Dmitry A. Kazakov
http://www.dmitry-kazakov.de