30 Sep
2010
30 Sep
'10
7:28 p.m.
On Thu, Sep 30, 2010 at 21:49, Alexey Toptygin <alexeyt at freeshell.org> wrote:
I know many, many people that can type faster than
they can talk. And then
there's programming. When every character matters, and many of them are
punctuation, speech recoginition (and speech for that matter) falls flat on
its face. It will never be faster to pronounce:
print join(',', map $_->(), @$closures), "\n" for 1..$num;
than it is to type it. And that's relatively readable; perl lets you code
with >50% punctuation...
Of course, programming languages these days are designed for typing,
with plenty of special characters to indicate common syntactic
elements. Try writing code on a typical smartphone qwerty keyboard;
it's a pain because the special characters, seldom used in text
messaging are hard to get to (sometimes only via menu). Example: the
Kindle...
Thus, programming using voice recognition should have a language
syntax adapted to it, and likely be very annoying to type. Perhaps
COBOL will see a resurrection ($deity save us all)!
Perhaps a new language can use non-speech vocalisations as syntax
elements. "Ummmm.." to delimit arguments to functions. A cough to
terminate statements. Clicking the tongue to delimit literals!
print umm... <click> result <click> umm... a umm.. b umm... d! <cough>
Programmer's cubicles will become very noisy places!
Joe.
--
Joachim Thiemann :: http://www.tsp.ece.mcgill.ca/~jthiem