Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!husc6!bloom-beacon!tut.cis.ohio-state.edu!rutgers!orstcs!mist!budd
From: budd@mist.cs.orst.edu (Tim Budd)
Newsgroups: comp.lang.misc
Subject: Re: What makes a language "easy" to program in?
Message-ID: <5158@orstcs.CS.ORST.EDU>
Date: 17 Jun 88 20:31:42 GMT
References: <3496@enea.se>
Sender: netnews@orstcs.CS.ORST.EDU
Reply-To: budd@mist.UUCP (Tim Budd)
Organization: Oregon State Universtiy - CS - Corvallis, Oregon
Lines: 14

No, I'm not sure you want a ``do what I want'' command.

The following story is true, I've just forgotten some of the less important
details.  There was a Lisp system once that had something called 
DWIM (do what I mean).  If you typed an expression, if it didn't make
sense, it would try various techniques to see if something close to it made
sense, and do that.  Now a friend of mine was using this system and kept
having amazingly slow programs.  It turned out he was saying things like
(CAR ...) when the system wanted (car ...).  It would not recognize CAR,
go through some analyzing, discover that a probable meaning was car, then
do it.  Problem was there was no feedback - no indication he was doing
anything wrong, it produced the right answer, just slowly.  So there are
dangers in ``do what I want'' systems even when (and this is a big if) they
can exactly figure out what it is that you want.