Dimensionality of program code

[Jeff Nowakowski]

On 01/21/2013 07:03 PM, Stewart Gordon wrote:
>
> So in your mind, a 2D image is not a picture, but just a representation
> of one? And if you cut that image up into 5 rows of 6 blocks, rearrange
> them into 3 rows of 10 blocks and glue them together, the result is the
> picture as much as the original is?
>
> You can choose to believe that if you want. But most people wouldn't.

OK, I did say I was done with the topic, but here you are assigning 
derogatory beliefs to me which I don't hold.

I never said you could rearrange the picture willy-nilly, merely that it 
can safely and *usefully* be serialized. Displaying a rearranged picture 
as you describe would be as invalid as doing the same to some code.

Now it is true that typical curly-brace languages don't require you to 
indent your code properly, but the fact that block-structured code leads 
to a natural and universal 2D representation (to an approximation, 
ignoring stylistic rules like tabs/spaces) has just as much validity as 
the 2D representation of a picture, and why I dispute the notion that 
block-structured code is "linear".

Now I really am done, regardless of what you write next.