22 Jun
2006
22 Jun
'06
4:08 a.m.
On 6/21/2006 at 8:13 PM Don Y wrote:
Would be read as "A colon colon equals B plus
one". So, the colons
here act as nonintuitive punctuation while the '+' does not.
And, in fact, the manner of expression of such stuff in computer languages
is taken for granted to the extent that we forget that the language is
really the language of mathematics.
Or, to put it a different way, if I wanted to convey the meaning of:
(5+3)/6 -2
without resorting to algebraic notation, I'd say something like:
"Add three to five and divide the result by six and subtract two"
which parses into computer instructions without the need for operator
precedence tables or stacks. In fact, it's interesting how much the
mathematical viewpoint dominates our way of looking at computers. For
example, if I want to do something 6 times in 'C', I have to code it as
something like "for ( i = 0; i < 6; i++) instead of saying "Do this six
times". (In all fairness, COBOL does have this in the PERFORM statement,
as does PL/I). Yet we humans aren't mathematical beings; we're symbol
manipulators. In other words, if I ask you to multiply 3 by 4, it's a
different matter than asking you to multiply 323 by 1019 because of the
extra symbol manipulation that I must do.
An interesting subject, Don!
Cheers,
Chuck