<I've removed the massive cross-posting - I wouldn't presume this message is all that interesting to folks in those other NG's, and I'm sure they'd be saying, "who the heck is Paul McGuire, and who gives a @#*$! what he thinks?">
"Joe Marshall" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote in message news:[EMAIL PROTECTED] > > Expressiveness isn't necessarily a good thing. For instance, in C, you > can express the > addresses of variables by using pointers. You cannot express the same > thing in Java, and > most people consider this to be a good idea. > For those who remember the bad old days of COBOL, its claim to fame was that it was more like English prose, with the intent of making a programming language that was as readable as English, assuming that this was more "expressive", and not requiring as much of a mental mapping exercise for someone trying to "read" a program. Even the language terminology itself strived for this: statements were "sentences"; blocks were "paragraphs". The sentence model may have ended up being one of COBOL's Achilles Heel's - the placement of terminating periods for an IF THEN ELSE block was crucial for disambiguating which ELSE went with which IF. Unfortunately, periods are one of the least visible printed characters, and an extra or missing period could cause hours of extra debugging. (Of course, at the time of COBOL's inception, the only primary languages to compare with were assembly or FORTRAN-60, so this idea wasn't totally unfounded.) -- Paul -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list