Subject:
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Re: What are all those lego companies?
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Newsgroups:
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lugnet.robotics
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Date:
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Fri, 16 Feb 2001 14:36:44 GMT
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Original-From:
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Barbara Nostrand <nostrand@acm.orgAVOIDSPAM>
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Viewed:
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873 times
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Hi.
> > > However, you can't have spaces in variable names...
> >
> > This is only due to inertia in the programming language world. Given the • speed of current
> > hardware, lexical efficiency is no longer as important as it used to be. • It is quite
> > possible to design language implementations that allow spaces in
> identifiers.
>
> It might be quite possible but that would be terribly wrong, and would not
> be C anymore. It also would "quite possible" for a computer to understand
> natural language but AFAIK no such thing exists.
I think that this response rather misses the point as does the original
question misunderstand the problem. The problem has nothing to do with
hardware implementation. C was originally designed to be compiled on a
computer with a disk drive and furthermore represents character strings
as arbitrary length null-terminated character arrays. Thus, the notion
that the limitation was one of hardware is simply mistaken. No. The
problem arises from software problems both in the computer sense and
the between the ears sense. Generally speaking, C is compiled by first
undergoing lexical analysis, followed by syntactic analysis, code
generation, &c. The problem with the proposal stems from how you do
lexical analysis in which the text is broken up into tokens such as
key words, variable names, literal constants, &c. This is done by
recognizing "white space" which can be a tab, a space, &c. It would
be possible to use something else as a token delimiter, but whatever
is used must be recognizable by the human programer when they read
their own code or someone else's code. While graphical input might
work for small code units, textual input optimizes space much better
and studies show that human programmers can handle up to about two
screen views or 50 lines of code at a time. Spreading this out
effectively reduces the utility of what a human programmer can handle.
Best Wishes
--
+----------------------------------+----------------------------------+
| Dr. Barbara Nostrand | Department of Computer Science |
| Associate Professor | Wilkes University |
| Computer Science and Engineering | Wilkes-Barre, Penn. |
| (570) 408-3846 | 18766 |
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Message is in Reply To:
 | | Re: What are all those lego companies?
|
| (...) speed of current (...) It is quite (...) identifiers. It might be quite possible but that would be terribly wrong, and would not be C anymore. It also would "quite possible" for a computer to understand natural language but AFAIK no such thing (...) (24 years ago, 16-Feb-01, to lugnet.robotics)
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