Re: simple vs complex languages

bear@sonic.net writes:
|>
|> > The need for programming, as with mathematics and serious science, is
|> > something that is precise and unambiguous.
|>
|> It goes a little beyond that. It's not merely something that's
|> precise and unambiguous, it's also ideally something that doesn't map
|> to ambiguous concepts and ideas in the human brain. And that's much
|> harder to accomplish. In natural languages, I think a word's ambiguity
|> is often a vital and irreducible part of its meaning; if we pick just
|> "one meaning or the other" we lose a nuance of what's being
|> communicated. IOW, I think ambiguity is a very important feature of
|> human communication (This is an unorthodox opinion, but I have a lot
|> of professional experience, mostly in natural-language software, and
|> it seems true to me). I can't easily imagine wanting that kind of
|> dynamic in a language that specifies instructions to a machine.


Good heavens! Is it really unorthodox? I know that I do it
deliberately, and that many people do not realise when they are doing
it, but I thought that it was the accepted model.


And I very much agree with your points about the consequences of
"ambiguity of understanding" as distinct from "ambiguity of
specification". Such aspects lead to what I call "gotchas", though I
may have cribbed the term from someone else, which I have spent far
too much of my life failing to persuade standards committees and
vendors are a Bad Thing. They go as follows:


        A specification defines some behaviour in such a way that the
boundary with undefined behaviour is relatively easier for the
specification to define than it is for the programmer or user to
avoid.


        A programmer or user then steps over the boundary by accident, and
the product fails unsafe (often doing something completely bananas,
like corrupting data).


        Somebody then tracks this down and complains to the relevant
authors that this is an error in the specification or product, and is
told "That is YOUR fault - the specification clearly says that is
undefined behaviour."


        GOTCHA!


Regards,
Nick Maclaren.

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