const

[Sean Kelly]

== Quote from Georg Wrede (georg at nospam.org)'s article
> More seriously, having to teach the particular language (be it
> high-school or university), gives one plenty more insight into this than
> I can even begin to say.

This is why I've never understood the argument that a language must have
as few keywords as it can get away with.  In my experience, having the same
symbol represent multiple concepts tends to cause confusion.  The ideal
situation is to have a simple syntax so only a few keywords are necessary,
but barring that, I'd think that choosing an expressive and appropriate
symbology for each situation would be best.  To me, it seems that the
"minimize keyword count" idea began as a way to verify conceptual
simplicity and has since become an arbitrary metric that measures
nothing.


Sean