Austin Hastings wrote:
The << and >> ... are just as pictographic (or
not) as [ and ].
I'm not particularly fond of << or >> either. ;) Damian just
wrote that he prefers non-alphabetic operators to help
differentiate nouns and verbs. I find it helpful when people
explain their biases like that. What's yours?
They look the same from top or bottom, and are
unmistakable in direction when looked at from either side.
Well, anything can look like itself, that wasn't the point. The
goal is to not look like anything else in any orientation. The
chars O and 0 fail badly, but A and T are excellent. I'm not
sure where << and >> fall because I don't have any experience
with them.
Programming languages probably get away with more because
most programmers don't spray paint algorithms on the side of
a bridge. (Well, Lisp programmers maybe. ;) My three points
against arbitrary punctuation as symbols are
(1) it's impossible to identify symbol boundaries when
reading punctuation -- you just have to guess,
(2) it's harder to work with punctuation in non-digital
communication, and
(3) my memory doesn't work well on punctuation symbols!
Perl has some nice features like sigils that clue people in on
how to read a sentence. But...
difference between ' (apostrophe) and ` (tick)
is a horrible abomination. ;)
If every keyboard and operating system had the ability to simply
generate arbitrary expressions of the form (expr-a) ** (expr-b), ad
infinitum (a ** b ** c ** d ** e) then we'd be remiss not to use it.
But they can't, so we don't.
Non sequitur. Written language prior to the printing press had
no technological reason to limit alphabet size. Some languages
developed very large pictographic representations, others
developed small alphabets with word formation rules. I have no
idea what the design pressures were that caused these different
solutions. Do you? What are the strengths and weaknesses of the
approaches? Why should we select one over the other?
- Ken
