Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!cs.utexas.edu!uunet!willett!dwp
From: dwp@willett.UUCP (Doug Philips)
Newsgroups: comp.lang.misc
Subject: Re: Anyone want to design a language?
Message-ID: <555.UUL1.3#5129@willett.UUCP>
Date: 25 Feb 90 01:36:59 GMT
References: <1106@thor.wright.EDU>
Organization: Latest link in the ForthNet chain.  (Pgh, PA)
Lines: 27

In <1106@thor.wright.EDU>, econrad@thor.wright.edu (Eric Conrad) writes:

> Why not prefix notation?  Prefix notation is more common than postfix
> in mathematical literature,
> 	f(x,y,z) rather than (x,y,z)f
> I suspect that it is a easier to read for those of us used to reading
> from left to right since it emphasizes the operators rather than the
> operands.
Whoa.  Lets avoid the right-to-left-is-better-ethnocentricism trap here.
My personal inclination is to try new things, since that is the easiest
way to get new perspectives and to evaluate existing practices.  It may
be that mathematics is the way to go, since it has been around for how many
orders of magnitude longer than programming?  On the other hand it may be
impossible to make a new insights or breakthroughs without abadoning the
old ways.

		-Doug

P.S.  My personal viewpoint is a fixation for post-fix.  This is due
to my perspective of 10 years of C programming and my recent discovery
of Forth.  From what I know of PostScript it is an even cleaner post-fix
language, in that it is more regular and consistent in being post-fix.
I'd be curious to hear what other people's perspectives are.

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