On 09/18/2010 08:35 PM, Seebs wrote:
On 2010-09-19, AK<andrei....@gmail.com> wrote:
Funny that you should say that, because I thought quite a few times that
it would be really awesome if some texts in English had syntax
highlighting. Obviously, not Brothers Karamazov, but something like a
tutorial, or a manual, or an online article. If key words were
highlighted, I'd be able to quickly glance over parts that are not
useful to me at the time, and find the interesting bits.
That wouldn't be *syntax* highlighting, that'd be *semantic* highlighting.
In case of programming, the effect is similar. I find that it allows me
to look quickly through code, scanning for something specific, e.g. the
next function, the next if/else block. If I'm looking for a print
statement, for example, I can quickly scan a whole screenful, looking
for a first highlighted long word (all the other highlighted keywords
will usually be if, else, and for). On the other hand, if I know I'm
looking for a variable, my eyes will filter out all the highlighted text
- strings and keywords. English is of course much less formal so you
have to understand the text to do useful highlighting. Anyway, I find it
very odd that anyone would not find it extremely useful (in code)!
Which people often do -- notice that I did it twice in that paragraph. But
that's the point -- you need to know what it *means* to make sensible
decisions about what to highlight. Syntax highlighting is precisely the
opposite, highlighting things for reasons that have nothing to do with
their semantic content. It distracts from the actual meaning of the
code.
I'm not always looking for meaning *immediately*. If I know there's a
single print statement in a function, I don't need to understand its
meaning to know that's the one print statement I need. (Or, if there's
two, I might know that I need the first one or at least I'll have 2
lines to look at instead of 75).
In short, syntax highlighting would be like writing:
FUNNY *that* _you_ *should* /say/ *that*.
It'd be like speed reading, except real!
I don't understand this. So far as I know, the phrase "speed reading"
refers to various methods of reading much faster than most people read,
and is real but not exceptionally interesting.
Afaik the idea is that you can read a novel at the speed of half a page
a second or so and understand it to the same extent as people who'd read
at a normal rate. Woody Allen joke: "I learned speed reading and
read War&Peace"; - it involves Russia.
-ak
--
http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
