Re: A proposal for the confusing pseudo table ≈ array concept

[KHMan <keinhong@...>]

On 1/20/2018 12:14 PM, Sean Conner wrote:
> It was thus said that the Great KHMan once stated:
> > Coders should be able to break mental barriers. The table is part
> > of the bedrock of Lua. It's a lookup. NoSQL is a lookup. Google is
> > a lookup. Plenty of folks come around and say, it should be done
> > this way, it should be done that way. Perhaps they have notions of
> > how things should be done and wants to impose their mental
> > limitations on this new thing they are learning.
>
>    I wouldn't call them "mental limitiations" and more like "expected
> behavior."  Coming from C, starting arrays from 1 is odd.  Not so if you
> come from Pascal.  For years, I felt hamstrung in C because there were
> things I could trivially do in Assembly that were clumsy in C, but that was
> be previous experience.  It took awhile to learn to speak C so to speak (and
> even today, I still have a preference for vertically aligned code and plenty
> of white space).

Okay, it's a mental limitation due to being accustomed to certain 
behaviours, styles, methods, techniques or habits.

Humans are habitual animals. The brain resists modification of 
habits. We must understand that it resists.

> > Let's see. In the 1960s, Fortran and COBOL would be the two
> > greatest computer languages in the whole wide world, the amazing,
> > awesome 21st century future made live. Where does Fortran and
> > COBOL stand now? Where would we be 50 years from now?
>
>    COBOL and Fortran are still around.  COBOL is probably legacy stuff, but
> there still is new code written in Fortran (latest version is Fortran 2008;
> there is a Fortran 2018 in the works).

Fortran 2008 has progressed a lot versus a 1960s Fortran.

There has been a huge amount of progress. People should be 
receptive to progress or change or differences.

Programming languages should have space for some degree of 
exploration.

> > We must be able to break these mental barriers to move forward.
> > Must all computer languages have separate types for arrays and
> > hashes? Is it an inviolable design requirement that some coders
> > expect? Free your mind. :-)
>
>    Must all computers languages have types?  They are useful, and in fact,
> they could be more powerful in catching errors than they are now.  Let's see
> ...

I'm very sorry, but as an argument, it is utter rubbish.

"Must all computers languages have types?"

"Must all computer languages have separate types for arrays and 
hashes?"

Tell me, what is being discussed? You are talking about something 
else totally. Is this a deliberate debating strategy?

About types, I'm sure everybody with an eye towards JIT wants more 
annotations. Keep an eye on the WebAssembly ecosystem. There will 
be pressure, voices, that want annotations everywhere. Why, some 
coders might even begin to think that no annotations is always bad 
for scripting languages. As in, if you don't keep up with the 
Joneses, your programming language is bad. I don't care either 
way, I just use appropriate tools to do stuff.

[snip]
> but I'm unaware of any language that has integrated units (it's a Unix
> command) as part of the langauge.  I think it would be interesting to see
> and might just have prevented the Mars Orbiter from blowing up because of
> mixed units.


--
Cheers,
Kein-Hong Man (esq.)
Selangor, Malaysia