Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!wuarchive!texbell!texsun!smunews!ti-csl!m2!gateley
From: gateley@m2.csc.ti.com (John Gateley)
Newsgroups: comp.lang.misc
Subject: Re: Anyone want to design a language?
Message-ID: <111800@ti-csl.csc.ti.com>
Date: 22 Feb 90 16:17:38 GMT
References: <22569:05:10:24@stealth.acf.nyu.edu> <635635738.28255@myrias.com>
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Organization: TI Computer Science Center, Dallas
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READABILITY CONSIDERED HARMFUL!

In article <635635738.28255@myrias.com> cg@myrias.com (Chris Gray) writes:
>One goal for ANY language is that it be quickly readable by anyone, whether
>they are familiar with that class of language or not.

I disagree with this statement. It might be fair to say that
a language should be readable by anyone who is familiar with
the basic concepts, but what Chris's statement does is limit
a language to concepts that everyone will be familiar with.
Anything that is subtle, powerful, or exciting also has the unfortunate
drawback that it is harder to read. Consider "call/cc" in Scheme,
forward inferencing a la OPS5, backwards inferencing a la Prolog,
Combinatory logic, first class functions and ...


John
gateley@m2.csc.ti.com