Dimitris Rizopoulos wrote: > in my opinion the point of the whole discussion could be summarized by > the question, what is a design flaw? This is totally subjective, and > it happens almost everywhere in life. Take human languages as an > example and in particular, English. I do not know the history of the > English language but I can guess at some point some people decided > that the past tense for "give" should be "gave" and not "gived" > according to the standard rule, possibly because they thought it has > better acoustic. > > Is this a design flaw of English? Some might argue yes, maybe they > would think "gived" does not have a that bad acoustic or they could > have come up with another possibility than "gave". Does this confuse > new users of English? Of course it does -- I had to spent many hours > learning the past tense and past particle of the irregular verbs. > Should it be changed? Then almost all existing code (i.e., English > texts) should be rewritten, which I think demonstrates why some people > are a bit reluctant in design changes. > > To close I'd like to share with you a Greek saying (maybe also a > saying in other parts of the world) that goes, for every rule there is > an exception. The important thing, in my opinion, is that these > exceptions are documented.
all this is true; however, programming languages are not natural languages, there are substantial differences, and conclusions valid for natural languages are not necessarily valid for programming languages. vQ ______________________________________________ R-devel@r-project.org mailing list https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-devel
