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From: emigh@ecsvax.UUCP (Ted Emigh)
Newsgroups: net.lang
Subject: Re: Reading programs left-to-right. (LONG)
Message-ID: <242@ecsvax.UUCP>
Date: Tue, 13-Aug-85 11:17:43 EDT
Article-I.D.: ecsvax.242
Posted: Tue Aug 13 11:17:43 1985
Date-Received: Mon, 19-Aug-85 06:12:30 EDT
References: <6571@boring.UUCP> <10984@rochester.UUCP>
Reply-To: emigh@ecsvax.UUCP (Ted Emigh)
Organization: NC State University
Lines: 30
From article <6571@boring.UUCP> (jack@mcvax.UUCP (Jack Jansen)):
>
>Something that caught my attention a while ago is the following:
>
>Why do most programming languages do assignments like
>
The suggestion is that
might be a better order.
As someone who has done a lot of scientific programming, I find
the former way much easier to read in debugging programs. In such cases,
I usually am interested in a few control variables (loop counters, etc),
and in when they change values. Much of the rest of the programs are filled
with various essentially irrelevant material (such as the actual scientific
computations). It is much easier for *ME* to parse the line and ignore
the irrelevant sections if the destination appears on the left. Have you
ever looked through a program trying to find the rightmost reference in
a set of lines of varying lengths? Particularly if many lines have
comments in the latter spaces on the line?
--Ted--
--
Ted H. Emigh Genetics and Statistics, North Carolina State U, Raleigh NC
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