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From: arnold@ucsfcgl.UUCP (Ken Arnold%CGL)
Newsgroups: net.lang.c
Subject: Re: C bites Dog!
Message-ID: <625@ucsfcgl.UUCP>
Date: Wed, 28-Aug-85 15:11:11 EDT
Article-I.D.: ucsfcgl.625
Posted: Wed Aug 28 15:11:11 1985
Date-Received: Fri, 30-Aug-85 11:06:08 EDT
References: <872@brl-tgr.ARPA> <2968@sdcc3.UUCP>
Reply-To: arnold@ucsfcgl.UUCP (Ken Arnold)
Organization: UCSF Computer Graphics Lab
Lines: 31

In article <2968@sdcc3.UUCP> ee161bep@sdcc3.UUCP (Paul Van de Graaf) writes:
>Action also has the if <> then <> fi style bracketing which I suppose was
>inspired by the Bourne shell.  I personally don't like the case .. esac stuff
>in the Bourne shell, but I can't understand why C programmers are so concerned
>about typing 2 to 5 letter keywords instead of (, ), {, and }.  I don't type
>special characters very well, and I think it's because of having to hit that
><shift> key.

To me it is not a question of typing, but a question of bandwidth.
Keywords look a lot like variables unless read, whereas symbols don't
look like variables at all.  The extreme examples are something like

	add a to b and assign to c

		vs.

	c = a + b

where the second is clearly more legible.  This can be taken to
extremes, of course, but I still find that it is easier to scan a
language which uses a reasonably rich token set instead of a lot of
keywords.  Once you learn such a set of symbols, it seems easier to
read quickly, probably because the bandwitdh of communication is
higher, and operators are quickly visible as operators, as distinct
from programmer-defined tokens.

How easy a language is to type seems relatively unimportant compared to
other factors, including legibility.  APL is reasonably easy to
*type*...

		Ken Arnold