On Tue, 16 Jul 2019 19:22:51 +0000, Seymour J Metz wrote:
>
>The cardinal sin in language design is to make the compiler simpler at the
>expense of the user. ...
>
I see a notable example of this in Rexx's not supporting expressions in compound
symbol tails which some have justified as making recognition of assignments
easier.
OTOH, Pascal declined to provide an exponentiation operator in order to expose
to programmers the underlying costly implementation:
X ** Y is implemented in other languages as exp( log( X ) * Y )
Physics graduate students complained to me when the FORTRAN runtime
threw an exception on X ** 2.0 when X was negative. "Why can't I square
a negative number?"
(Some BASIC interpreters take special paths when a number has an integral
value.)
And they complained when (FORTRAN, but easier in C pseudocode):
for ( X = 0; X!=1.0; X+=0.1 ) { ...; }
... never terminated. "Roundoff error!? Why doesn't it just use the exact
value
of one tenth?"
DWIM?
-- gil
----------------------------------------------------------------------
For IBM-MAIN subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions,
send email to lists...@listserv.ua.edu with the message: INFO IBM-MAIN
