On Tue, Apr 1, 2014 at 2:19 AM, Antoon Pardon <antoon.par...@rece.vub.ac.be> wrote: > On 01-04-14 02:47, Ian Kelly wrote: >> On Mon, Mar 31, 2014 at 1:31 PM, Antoon Pardon >> <antoon.par...@rece.vub.ac.be> wrote: >>> Second of all I >>> think a good chosen symbolic name can be more readable than a >>> name in a character set you are not familiar with. A good chosen >>> symbol will evoke a meaning with a lot of people. A name in a >>> character set you are not familiar with is just gibberish to >>> you. >> Well, this is the path taken by APL. It has its supporters. It's not >> known for being readable. > > No that is not the path taken by APL. AFAICS identifiers in APL are just > like identifiers in python. The path taken by APL was that there were > a lot more operators available that used non-alphanumeric characters. > > AFICS APL programs tend to be unreadable because they are mostly written > in a very concise style. > > I think this is more the path taken by lisp-like languages where '+' is > a name just like 'alpha' or 'r2d2'. In scheme I can just do the following. > > (define √ sqrt) > (√ 4)
You're still using the symbol as the name of an operation, though, so I see no practical difference from the APL style. The operation just happens to be user-defined rather than built-in. Granted that in Scheme or in Python-with-arbitrary-Unicode-identifiers you could just as easily name a variable √, but I don't think that is what you are proposing in terms of choosing symbols to evoke meaning. > Which will give me the normal result. Maybe I missed it but I haven't heard > scheme being called an unreadable language. Well, I have, but I think that usually has more to do with an excess of parentheses. -- https://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list