When words are good and when words are bad

[David Herron, NPR Lover]

In article <357 at brl-tgr.ARPA> DHowell.ES at Xerox.ARPA writes:
>It seems like there's this programming language called APL which uses
>almost nothing but symbols.  Does you think APL is more readable than
>Pascal, Ada, C, etc.?  I'm sure you're in a vast minority if you think
>so.
>
>Dan

No, I don't think APL is a more readable language than anything else.
I particularly don't like the habit of teaching people to program APL
to be unreadable.  It CAN be readable but people take pride in just 
the opposite.

While you're reading this, take a look at my subject.  My original article
was intended in pointing out some good uses for symbology.  And that
in C there were already existing GOOD alternatives to declaring a increment()
function.

On the other hand.  Would someone tell me some good symbols to use in
place of something like 'while' or 'for'?  Symbology better than using
the words?  Keep in mind that many languages already have certain
operations already assigned to these particular words.  And these
operations are similar enough to the C operations that people can
easily think about it either way.

Like I said.  Sometimes words are good and sometimes they are bad.

There are things better said with non-words.  For instance, the ++
operator is much better than defining an increment().  With ++ you
can specify WHEN the increment happens (within a certain degree, as
they say in K&R, "i++ = j++;" is undefined).

Somebody give me a GOOD argument about THAT!

-- 
--- David Herron
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