Relay-Version: version B 2.10 5/3/83; site utzoo.UUCP Posting-Version: version B 2.10.2 9/18/84; site ecsvax.UUCP Path: utzoo!linus!philabs!cmcl2!seismo!harvard!talcott!panda!genrad!decvax!mcnc!ecsvax!emigh From: emigh@ecsvax.UUCP (Ted Emigh) Newsgroups: net.lang Subject: Re: Reading programs left-to-right. (LONG) Message-ID: <242@ecsvax.UUCP> Date: Tue, 13-Aug-85 11:17:43 EDT Article-I.D.: ecsvax.242 Posted: Tue Aug 13 11:17:43 1985 Date-Received: Mon, 19-Aug-85 06:12:30 EDT References: <6571@boring.UUCP> <10984@rochester.UUCP> Reply-To: emigh@ecsvax.UUCP (Ted Emigh) Organization: NC State University Lines: 30 From article <6571@boring.UUCP> (jack@mcvax.UUCP (Jack Jansen)): > >Something that caught my attention a while ago is the following: > >Why do most programming languages do assignments like > The suggestion is that might be a better order. As someone who has done a lot of scientific programming, I find the former way much easier to read in debugging programs. In such cases, I usually am interested in a few control variables (loop counters, etc), and in when they change values. Much of the rest of the programs are filled with various essentially irrelevant material (such as the actual scientific computations). It is much easier for *ME* to parse the line and ignore the irrelevant sections if the destination appears on the left. Have you ever looked through a program trying to find the rightmost reference in a set of lines of varying lengths? Particularly if many lines have comments in the latter spaces on the line? --Ted-- -- Ted H. Emigh Genetics and Statistics, North Carolina State U, Raleigh NC USENET: {akgua decvax duke ihnp4 unc}!mcnc!ecsvax!emigh ARPA: decvax!mcnc!ecsvax!emigh@BERKELEY BITNET: nemigh@tucc