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Re: [Gnu-arch-users] Re: Tla spork


From: Robert Anderson
Subject: Re: [Gnu-arch-users] Re: Tla spork
Date: Fri, 27 Aug 2004 09:02:33 -0700
User-agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.4.1) Gecko/20031008

Andrew Suffield wrote:

On Fri, Aug 27, 2004 at 12:53:43PM +0900, Miles Bader wrote:
The question is whether the burden of learning something new is
outweighed by the vast potential for abstraction offered by a very
regular syntax

That's a myth. Transforming between natural and prefix notation is
trivial, loses no data, and is performed implicitly by just about
every compiler (since they all shift into the abstract tree form that
can become either). So there's no more "potential for abstraction";
any transformation you can do to one can be done to the other just as
easily.


I think you're either wrong or splitting hairs about what "potential for abstraction" means.

I think the intended meaning is "potential for easy discovery and convenient use of abstraction," not that it is in some mathematical sense there or not. In which case notation is paramount. You will generally find more abstraction in a C++ code than in an assembly language code, not because it wasn't possible in assembly, just because it wasn't as convenient, or easy to spot the abstractions as they were suggested during development.

Bob






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