Path: utzoo!utgpu!news-server.csri.toronto.edu!cs.utexas.edu!samsung!uunet!mcsun!ukc!dcl-cs!aber-cs!athene!pcg From: pcg@cs.aber.ac.uk (Piercarlo Grandi) Newsgroups: comp.lang.misc Subject: Re: Fortran vs. C for numerical work - expression notation Message-ID: Date: 10 Dec 90 20:26:45 GMT References: <16798@csli.Stanford.EDU> <8339@lanl.gov> <16799@csli.Stanford.EDU> Sender: pcg@aber-cs.UUCP Organization: Coleg Prifysgol Cymru Lines: 49 Nntp-Posting-Host: odin In-reply-to: poser@csli.Stanford.EDU's message of 9 Dec 90 02:56:19 GMT On 9 Dec 90 02:56:19 GMT, poser@csli.Stanford.EDU (Bill Poser) said: In article <16799@csli.Stanford.EDU> poser@csli.Stanford.EDU (Bill Poser) writes: poser> Regarding Piercarlo Grandi's argument that programming notation poser> should differ as much as possible from mathematical notation, poser> I am not terribly sympathetic. I am afraid that you like Jim Giles did not understand my argument -- it was not "since maths and programming are so different the notations should be different as well", but "since maths and programming are so different, similarity of notation is irrelevant and possibly even a trap for the unwary". I am not advocating pursuing difference of notation as a benefit; I am saying that it should not be seen as an advantage of Fortran, and if it seen as such, this may indicate little awareness of the immense difference therein. Hey, Mathematica (as somebody remarked) has an even more maths like notation than Fortran, but this does not mean that the semantics of those operations are the same (at least in the numerical domain -- as to the symbolic one Mathematics used to have several bugs :->). poser> I suspect that this will just make people spend their time poser> learning the funny new notation, not make them think harder about poser> how actual digital computation differs from symbolic or ideal poser> continuous numerical computation. Oh yes, I can accept that. After all one of my alternatives to Fortran was C++, because of its abstraction capabilities; one can use them to create even more faithful reproduction of maths like notation, even if again I think it is pointless. poser> So, no, I'm not advocating gratuitious differences, just poser> suggesting: (a) that Fortran and C are not very different in this poser> respect; (b) that these differences probably don't matter very poser> much. Notation is usually not that important, as long as it helps work instead of hindering it, understanding the issues is. Maybe a noation that does not resemble traditional notation helps more understand that the semantics do not resemble traditional semantics, maybe not. -- Piercarlo Grandi | ARPA: pcg%uk.ac.aber.cs@nsfnet-relay.ac.uk Dept of CS, UCW Aberystwyth | UUCP: ...!mcsun!ukc!aber-cs!pcg Penglais, Aberystwyth SY23 3BZ, UK | INET: pcg@cs.aber.ac.uk