Re: text in programming languages, Unicode in strings

Anton Ertl wrote:

John Levine <johnl@taugh.com> writes:

According to Stephen Fuld <SFuld@alumni.cmu.edu.invalid>:

That may have been the idea, but I think the idea was wrong.

 
I think few would disagree with both parts of that.  I certainly
wouldn't.  But I give the designers some slack as, in the late
1950s, there was lettle knowledge about programming languages to
go on.

 
Certainly.
 

Now, the mistake is obvious.

 
Maybe not so obvious.  Certainly, as the start of this discussion
shows, the idea that a programming language should orient itself
towards the native language of a person is not yet universally
considered a mistake.

Subtle difference.  To me, the "mistake" was trying to make the
programming language as similar as possible to "natural" language (as
opposed to the relative tersness of a more "mathematical language", not
any particular natural language.  On the other hand, I think APL showed
that one can go too far in that direction as well.  :-(

 
Anyway, such mistakes are valuable as we now can say that this idea
was tried, and did not catch on.

Agreed.



--
 - Stephen Fuld
(e-mail address disguised to prevent spam)