> Is this a good idea? Probably absolutely not, but it is quite fun. :-)
Besides being cool clean fun, I wonder - only semi-jokingly - if it may be useful to streamline the interface between "algorithmists" and "developers". In many organizations "scientists" are supposed to produce algorithms in the form of pseudocode that "developers" are supposed to translate to working code. Stuff is often lost in translation, the pseudocode is found to be incomplete or buggy or completely unimplementable, the developers are found to be mathematicaly illiterate or worse, and so on. So can, for the beneft of companies who employ scientists who cannot program but know maths and corresponding notation alongside developers who know the syntax but can't figure out what is wanted of them, the gap be bridged? Can the "mathematician" write down the algo in pseudocode, using agreed upon conventions, then "unfontify" it and check that it a) compiles; b) produces correct output for given inputs thus testing for bugs ike off-by-one tha can easily crawl into unrunnable pseudocode? If the pseudocode contains some statements that the "pretty-unfontified" version's compiler barfs on that likely means that the algo is incomplete and some operation/function/whatever is un(der)?defined. This will be flagged before it aggravates the coder's life, etc. It's fun to muse, not just to write elisp. Thumbs up for knowing to enjoy yourselves, regardless of utility. -- Oleg Goldshmidt | p...@goldshmidt.org _______________________________________________ Linux-il mailing list Linux-il@cs.huji.ac.il http://mailman.cs.huji.ac.il/mailman/listinfo/linux-il
