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Hajo
Demon Hunter


Joined: 30 Sep 2003
Posts: 779
Location: Between chair and keyboard.

PostPosted: Mon Mar 14, 2005 1:36 pm    Post subject: [quote]

Joakim wrote:
What is redundant is a matter of taste. For ugly, redundant syntax, I think a?b:c is a good example. And the { might be fewer characters, but require you to press two keys that are placed uncomfortably (on my keyboard at least, it's alt gr and 7)


What's redundant among a?b:c
I can't imagine a format with less redundant information.

I wrote a macro so that ctrl-7 produces

{

}

And places the cursor in between. I need the braces in pairs almost all of the time anyways. Ctrl-7 is more convenient than AltGR-7 and I safe the AltGr-0 for the } brace.
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SJ_Zero
Pretty, Pretty Fairy Princess


Joined: 25 Apr 2003
Posts: 13

PostPosted: Mon Mar 14, 2005 1:53 pm    Post subject: [quote]

While you may consider such things hand holding, it's not a crime to want things to be more intuitive. Master woodworkers use scroll saws when they could use a giant serraded sword. Mechanics use wrenches and screwdrivers when they could just as easily work out their fingers and turn bolts and screws manually.

It's an abberation of the computer industry that says that the hardest way is the best. Even engineers use approximations where they can, because it's not smart or safe to make things more difficult than they have to be.
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Hajo
Demon Hunter


Joined: 30 Sep 2003
Posts: 779
Location: Between chair and keyboard.

PostPosted: Mon Mar 14, 2005 2:58 pm    Post subject: [quote]

Hmmm ... seen this way I'm sure C (and particularly C++) offers the bigger chainsaws and the more powerful wrenches. Up to a size that they become dangerous for yourself ;)

Java seems to be a good compromise in terms of power and safety.
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SJ_Zero
Pretty, Pretty Fairy Princess


Joined: 25 Apr 2003
Posts: 13

PostPosted: Mon Mar 14, 2005 4:57 pm    Post subject: [quote]

Show me the bigger wrench and I'll conceed that point. As things sit, however, All I see is FreeBASIC, capable of using any C API after the headers are ported. Any additional 'torque' gained by using C is quickly being lost as FreeBASIC manages to implement more and more powerful features with every release.

It seems to me that the difference is that my wrenches have rubber grips for comfort, and for some reason you need an alan key to adjust the crescent wrench. :P
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LeoDraco
Demon Hunter


Joined: 24 Jun 2003
Posts: 584
Location: Riverside, South Cali

PostPosted: Mon Mar 14, 2005 5:39 pm    Post subject: [quote]

Joakim wrote:
What is redundant is a matter of taste. For ugly, redundant syntax, I think a?b:c is a good example. And the { might be fewer characters, but require you to press two keys that are placed uncomfortably (on my keyboard at least, it's alt gr and 7), which makes "then" less than significally harder to type, yet it's much more intuitive. In my opinion.


What type of crazy keyboard do you have? For me, a brace is made by hitting shift and bracket.

And the ternary operator has to be the sexiest operator in C/C++; there is hardly anything "redundant" about it (unless, of course, you implication is that C/C++ already have a conditional). The ternary operator is something that is devilishly convenient, especially when doing output.

Now take a BASIC example:
Code:
if foo then
...
end if


The necessity to have to specify what type of block one is "ending" is just silly, and needlessly redundant. It would be (moderately) more acceptible if blocks could just be closed by a simple "end" keyword. Nothing is gained (logically, semantically, or syntactically) from having to put that extra data on there. Unless, of course, one codes without whitespace. (Which is just silly, regardless.)

I also don't think SJ_Zero's parallel to physical craftsmanship is valid: beyond talk of "wrenches" being nonsensical, part of the beauty of C/C++ is that there is hardly anything implemented in the core of either language, which means that the languages themselves are not bogged down by a lot of useless fluff.

From another standpoint, from what spurious documentation I could find on this project, the language isn't even object-oriented (minor correction, after rereading the "features": it seems that "UDT"s (which is a silly name to give to types; a type is a type, regardless of whether it is in the language core or not) may have functions; however, the nomenclature for describing such a member is bad (method, I believe, is far more canonical), and the syntax for declaring such is ugly and nonsensical); while procedural code can, on occasion, be more clean or straight-forward, there exists an intrinsic beauty in OOD that makes programming much more maintainable and extensible.

I have said, in much of the above, that BASIC syntax is ugly and nonsensical. I stand by this claim. You (SJ_Zero) claim that BASIC is more "intuitive"; Between

Code:
int foo;


and

Code:
foo as integer


I'll pick the former any day as being the more clean and intuitive.
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