Re: problems with identifiers and keywords...

On Wednesday 17 Nov 2004 4:36 pm, you wrote:
> I am not sure I agree with this. Human languages are fairly hard
> for machines to parse, yet presumably designed for humans to
> understand. In a large number of cases, I don't believe humans have
> problems with keywords used as identifiers,


Humans very rarely use keywords as identifiers: how many (English)
people do you know who are called "The" or "And"?
"Pass me the the will you, And?" is not immediately obvious.


More seriously, humans are good at pattern matching: with a small
number of keywords (and properly indented code) a human can pick out
the keywords instantly and work out the overall structure of a chunk
of code very quickly. When keywords are also used as identifiers,
this is not possible.


So the real solution to the problem of lots of keywords (where a
programmer might use an unfamiliar keyword as an identifier) is simply
to define fewer keywords and *not* to use unique keywords for rarely
used constructs in the language.
--
Martin


Martin.Ward@durham.ac.uk http://www.cse.dmu.ac.uk/~mward/ Erdos number: 4
[Someone else wrote in asking "Who's on first?" -John]

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