Path: utzoo!mnetor!uunet!husc6!think!ames!pasteur!ucbvax!decwrl!hplabs!hp-pcd!uoregon!markv From: markv@uoregon.uoregon.edu (Mark VandeWettering) Newsgroups: comp.lang.misc Subject: Re: Language illiteracy Message-ID: <1940@uoregon.uoregon.edu> Date: 7 May 88 04:50:32 GMT References: <786@trwcsed.trwrb.UUCP> <8088@ames.arpa> <765@l.cc.purdue.edu> <3151@whutt.UUCP> Reply-To: markv@drizzle.UUCP (Mark VandeWettering) Distribution: na Organization: University of Oregon, Computer Science, Eugene OR Lines: 32 >In article <765@l.cc.purdue.edu>, cik@l.cc.purdue.edu (Herman Rubin) writes: > > An even bigger problem is that most people, including many mathematicians, are > unable to see that mathematics is an absolutely essential language _if you are > considering non-routine situations_. I thought I would leap into the fray and get my bytes in for the week. First of all, I found your statement above to be meaningless. Define "non-routine situations" for me please. I wouldn't say that mathematics is _essential_ to any activity. While I am a strong believer in functional proramming, the one area of programming which does borrow heavily from mathematics, I also believe that languages should be practical. While FP, ML and SASL are neat to play with, I program in C and Lisp. The entire concept of a *perfect* language is silly. There is no such animal. Your claims that mathematics makes a good language is equally silly. 90% of the time I spend reading research papers is spent decoding some mathematicians pet notation. Mathematics suffers from exactly the same problems as programming languages: ideas get muddled in notation. Of course the ultimate in silly is the fact that you claim that you can design a better language, but then decline to give us a proof by example. Enough. mark vandewettering