Path: utzoo!utgpu!news-server.csri.toronto.edu!cs.utexas.edu!asuvax!mcdphx!udc!preece From: preece@urbana.mcd.mot.com (Scott E. Preece) Newsgroups: comp.object Subject: Re: Readability of Ada Message-ID: Date: 22 Apr 91 21:36:31 GMT References: Sender: news@urbana.mcd.mot.com (news) Distribution: comp Organization: Motorola MCD, Urbana Design Center Lines: 64 In-Reply-To: jls@rutabaga.Rational.COM's message of 17 Apr 91 03:28:52 GMT Nntp-Posting-Host: etude.urbana.mcd.mot.com In article jls@rutabaga.Rational.COM (Jim Showalter) writes: | 2) The history of software engineering has been more profoundly warped | by the simple fact that most programmers are only hunt-and-peck | typists than by anything else. This explains constricted identifier | names and an emphasis on notational compaction at the expense of | understandability. | | Corollary: the term "verbose", applied to a programming language, | is COMPLIMENTARY, not perjorative. | | 3) Some languages, by their very design and syntax, are superior to | others in terms of support for readability. Writing as well as | possible in C, one can still not write programs that are as readable | and understandable as programs written in Ada by an equally competent | programmer with the same objectives in mind. --- I can't evaluate your statements without a concrete definition of readability. A lot of poetry (which you use as a complimentary adjective) is not very readable at all -- it takes intelligence, application, and thought to work out what it means. Suppose you have two examples implementing the same functions in two different languages and you ask "Which is more readable?" If by readability you mean ease of correct interpretation by someone who has no particular knowledge of either language, you may get a very different answer than if you mean by readability ease of correct interpretation by someone who is fluent in both languages. The statement that verbosity is complimentary is simply broken and reflects, I think, a misunderstanding of the way we understand language. There is a reason that style manuals preach concision -- our minds have limited scope. Dense language can increase the amount of material that we can comprehend before suffering stack overflow (there is, needless to say, bad dense language as well as good dense language, and bad dense language can be *much* worse than bad loose language, though one could argue that its denseness at least makes its badness more obvious). It would be foolish to program for the reading level of the novice programmer just as it would be foolish to write instruction manuals for the first-grade reading level. Readability judgements must take into account the effective use of idiom as well as the similarity or difference from standard English syntax. Frankly, I didn't find the Ada particularly readable -- it was too large to fit on one screen and I lost interest in the exercise. The C code (once it was formatted and its variables made more useful) was small enough to be seen in its entirety, allowing the eye to follow interpretive explorations easily and quickly. I think the statement in paragraph (3) is exactly as true as the statement that "the equally competent poet can, of course, write more beautiful poems in French than would be possible in English." One would have no trouble finding people who would support the statement in Montreal or Paris (though they might disagree on specifics!), but I don't find it particularly convincing... scott -- scott preece motorola/mcg urbana design center 1101 e. university, urbana, il 61801 uucp: uunet!uiucuxc!udc!preece, arpa: preece@urbana.mcd.mot.com phone: 217-384-8589 fax: 217-384-8550