Path: utzoo!yunexus!geac!daveb
From: daveb@geac.UUCP (David Collier-Brown)
Newsgroups: comp.lang.ada
Subject: Re: Typing Ada
Message-ID: <2780@geac.UUCP>
Date: 26 May 88 12:40:39 GMT
Article-I.D.: geac.2780
Posted: Thu May 26 08:40:39 1988
References: <12400764147.13.RCONN@SIMTEL20> <25135.580491166@mbunix> <1017@cresswell.quintus.UUCP>
Reply-To: daveb@geac.UUCP (David Collier-Brown)
Organization: The Geac Pretty Picture Department
Lines: 25


In article <25135.580491166@mbunix>, munck@MITRE-BEDFORD.ARPA (Bob Munck) writes:
|  People can "read"
|  pictures better than words in a row; machines, until recently, couldn't
|  do anything at all with pictures and could handle only very simple
|  sequences of words (programming languages).  I think it likely that Ada
|  will be the LAST major one-dimensional programming language.

In article <1017@cresswell.quintus.UUCP> ok@quintus.UUCP (Richard A. O'Keefe) writes:
| People can read *some* *small* pictures better than they can read text
| conveying the same information.  But it doesn't seem plausible to me that
| a program which would have been say 50k lines of ADA would be easy to
| follow as a collection of several thousand pictures.  

I think you're both right.  Details are often best shown in text,
general structure in pictures.  I'd certainly prefer to walk a
call/rendesvous structure in pictoral form than by reading text, and
reason about the details by reading code and not pictographs.

--dave (horses for courses, perhaps) c-b
-- 
 David Collier-Brown.  {mnetor yunexus utgpu}!geac!daveb
 Geac Computers Ltd.,  | "His Majesty made you a major 
 350 Steelcase Road,   |  because he believed you would 
 Markham, Ontario.     |  know when not to obey his orders"