On 18/01/2013 21:50, Jeff Nowakowski wrote:
<snip>
I think you dismiss the embedded space too easily. We call a plot laid
out in 2D is a 2D-plot. You use both dimensions to specify it.
But does "plot" mean the curve or the whole diagram?
<snip>
Even a 2D picture can (and often is) represented as a series of ones and
zeroes. That doesn't mean the essential 2D aspects of it don't exist. To
say that the 2D layout of block structures "means nothing" is misguided.
The program structure is not defined by this layout. It's defined by
the curly brackets.
It's fundamentally there, just like the 2D picture that's been serialized.
But the whole essence of a picture is that it's two-dimensional. In a D
program you can escape all line breaks within strings, cut out all
comments (or turn all // comments into /*..*/ comments), and then remove
all line breaks that remain, and it will still be essentially the same
program. You can't do that with a picture.
OTOH, because we tend to view code in a two-dimensional form, and even
rely on line breaks and block indentation to make code readable, I can
understand people thinking of code as 2D.
We can rely on it because the 2D aspect is there in structured code,
even if the compiler doesn't force this layout.
<snip>
Structure and visual layout are two fundamentally different things.
Stewart.
