On Fri, 27 Oct 2006, Hakim Cassimally wrote: > > this seems to afflict the Haskell community, who write books full of > very pretty "->" symbols and various other mathematical things, all of > which you *don't actually use* when writing haskell source.
I was recently reading this paper http://www.csse.monash.edu.au/~damian/papers/PDF/SevenDeadlySins.pdf which has a few good points, but in one respect is seriously misguided. It proposes that introductory programming languages should use less confusing symbols, such as U+00D7 MULTIPLICATION SIGN instead of * and U+2190 LEFT ARROW for assignment. Never mind the fact that it's a struggle to even type the things, and that it's missing an opportunity to teach the poor dears about the arbitrariness and generally bad design of programming languages. Tony. -- f.a.n.finch <d...@dotat.at> http://dotat.at/ GERMAN BIGHT: NORTHWEST BACKING SOUTHWEST 5 TO 7, OCCASIONALLY GALE 8 AT FIRST. SQUALLY SHOWERS THEN RAIN. MODERATE OR GOOD.
