On Wednesday, February 26, 2003, at 11:14 am, Alberto Monteiro wrote:
I feel I can exercise a lot more control with a computer programming language that uses instructions that resemble natural language.
When my wife was doing a two-year computing course she had to learn COBOL. I'd never used COBOL, and when I saw it I found it close to incomprehensible. The only other language I've seen that is anywhere near as ugly is Applescript, which is another language with a "friendly, English-like syntax". [1]
This is your feeling, but not mine. I think a computer language that adds unnecessary symbols make it harder to understand what the code is doing. Properly formatted, languages with _less_ symbols are more clear. I like, for example, to compare C with Pascal.
I much prefer C to Pascal. Or Modula-2 or Ada or any of those other B&D languages.
[1] Someone was reviewing the manuscript of a book on Applescript. There was some pseudo-code followed by the Applescript code to implement it. The reviewer pointed out that thanks to the "friendly, English-like syntax" the 'pseudo-code' would actually run and do the job...
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William T Goodall
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"Computers in the future may weigh no more than 1.5 tons." - Popular Mechanics, forecasting the relentless march of science, 1949
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