Declaration syntax

[H. S. Teoh]

On Wed, Jan 08, 2014 at 09:18:16PM +0000, Boyd wrote:
> On Wednesday, 8 January 2014 at 20:12:03 UTC, H. S. Teoh wrote:
[...]
> >>I do wish that programmers would be more open to such ideas.  There
> >>is too much pointless bickering about miniscule syntactic changes,
> >>yet no one seems to be interested in fixing the archaic use of plain
> >>text files.
> >
> >https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parkinson's_law_of_triviality
> >
> >:-)
> >
> >We like to bicker about syntax because everybody understands it and
> >has direct experience of it. Semantics -- we know we need it, and
> >we've dabbled in it some, but nobody really understands it in its
> >entirety, so as long as it's Turing-complete (whatever *that*
> >means... :P), that's good enough for us. Leave us the time to argue
> >over syntax and how to make the "right" coffee.
> 
> Oh feel free too keep bickering, I'll even join you:) I was just being
> a bit dramatic, and maybe hoping to find someone with similar ideas.

No problem, let's just call the $1 billion D compiler nuclear reactor
project a done deal, and get back to the bickering over the syntactic
bikeshed. :-)


> >On a more serious note, though, I classify the use of plain text
> >files vs. whatever alternative representation format to be equally
> >trivial as bikeshedding over syntax.  The important issues at hand
> >are the *semantics* of programming -- how to capture the sheer
> >complexity of computation in a way that can make extremely complex
> >computations tractable to our limited mental capacity.  The history
> >of the progress of programming is keyed on exactly this issue.
> 
> It's not exactly the representation format I'm worried about, but
> rather the organization of code.

Well, how *should* code be organized?

So far, the best we've come up with in the industry is to break it up
into functions at the low levels, and classes and modules at the
mid-level, and libraries and packages at the high-level. I'm not sure
this hierarchical arrangement is the best there is, though it seems
sufficient for what it does. Unfortunately, I don't have a better
solution either.  Nothing on the level of ground-breaking ideas that
change the way we think about code, anyway.


T

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