Carl Ellison <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes:
> Source code is human speech, for human-to-human communication. It has a
> side-effect of being compilable into machine code, but it is in a human
> language and is intended for human communication.
This strikes me as patently false.
If programmers though this way, they'd make an attempt to make their
source code readable, but by and large they don't. Moreover, the
code (especially C code) is littered with constructs which serve
no communicative purpose but solely tell the computer what to do.
(Memory management comes to mind as a prime example. The only
purpose of calling free() is to release memory. It serves no
expository purpose. This is clearly shown by the fact that
garbage collected languages do without it.)
> Have you ever modified a program written by someone else? What's your first
> step? You read the program, to find out what it does. You don't read the
> massive paper document that describes what the program does and how ..
> because there is no such document. You don't read the comments in the code
> .. because there are lamentably few comments. Therefore, you read the
> source code.
Because it's your only choice.
> My first system programming professor drove this point home
> to us -- noting that even solitary projects require communication to some
> "other" programmer: namely ourselves at a later date when we've forgotten
> what was in our minds at the time we started writing the code.
The very fact that you have to be taught this should make clear
that the actual purpose of code is instructing machines, not people.
People hardly ever forget that the purpose of writing text is
communication.
> QED
Hardly.
-Ekr
--
[Eric Rescorla [EMAIL PROTECTED]]
