On Fri, Feb 18, 2011 at 12:43:37AM EST, John Nagle wrote: > On 2/17/2011 6:55 PM, Cor Gest wrote:
[..] >> At least it should try to mimick a space-cadet keyboard, shouldn't >> it? > I've used both the "MIT Space Cadet" keyboard on a Symbolics LISP > machine, and the Stanford SAIL keyboard. There's something to be > said for having more mathematical symbols. Really..? Wow..! I only every saw pictures of the beast and I was never really convinced it was for real.. :-) > Some programs use a bigger character set. MathCAD, for example, > has a broader range of mathematical symbols on the input side than > ASCII offers. They're not decorative; MathCAD has different "=" > symbols for assignment, algebraic equivalence, identity, and > comparison. Out of curiosity, I played a bit of APL lately, and I was amazed at how quickly you get to learn the extra symbols and their location on the keyboard. Had intergrating the basic concepts of the language been that easy, I would have been comfortably coding within a couple of hours. I was also rather enchanted by the fact that the coding closely matched my intentions. No overloading in this respect. Not that I'm an APL advocate, but who knows what programming languages will look like in the not-so-distant future. > I've previously mentioned that Python suffers in a few places > from unwanted overloading. Using "+" for concatenation of > strings, then extending that to vectors, resulted in undesirable > semantics. "+" on arrays from "numpy", and on built-in vectors > behave quite differently. A dedicated concatenation operator > would have avoided that mess. And the worst part of it is that you get so used to it that you take such matters for granted. Thanks for the eye-opener. > C++ has worse problems, because it uses < and > as both brackets > and operators. This does horrible things to the syntax. .. from a quite different perspective it may be worth noting that practically all programming languages (not to mention the attached documentation) are based on the English language. And interestingly enough, most any software of note appears to have come out of cultures where English is either the native language, or where the native language is either relatively close to English.. Northern Europe mostly.. and not to some small extent, countries where English is well-established as a universal second language, such as India. Always struck me as odd that a country like Japan for instance, with all its achievements in the industrial realm, never came up with one single major piece of software. cj -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list