[Bluej-discuss] bluej-discuss Digest, Vol 52, Issue 12

[Sharon M. Tuttle]

(My apologies that this starts out off-topic - I'll bring it back to
BlueJ at the end!)

> Pre/postfix belongs in compilers and very old hp calculators only!!!
> All humor aside anything but infix requires an amazing amount of
> conceptual conversion between problem and code space.   That plus having
> to count parens basically rules out any lisp variant in my mind.

All humor aside --- have you really looked at a function call lately?
What is really all that different between (sqrt 4) and sqrt(4)? There
are even the same number of parentheses! 8-) Function (and method) calls
look pretty darn prefix to me.

And if you use an IDE (like DrScheme) that highlights the portion of code
you've closed every time you type a closing parenthesis, you might find
you don't have to count parentheses all that much. Of course, Bluej's
parenthesis and curly-brace matching is also quite useful for the same
reason. And in all cases, proper indentation helps to avoid blind
"bracket-counting" (which of course isn't what you meant, I'm just
bloviating! 8-) )

But, back to BlueJ - the difference between a tool that "poof" indents
your code all at once in the end and one that assumes the next line
should start lined up with the previous is large indeed -- it all goes
back to what students *see* when they look at their code, from its
very earliest stages. Students need to get in the habit creating and
reading properly-indented code - tools that indent all at the end don't
encourage that. So, making any such tool a separate extension that isn't
*too* easy for students to load onto their home computers at the beginning
of the semester would be preferable... 8-)

-- Sharon Tuttle
   Humboldt State University

On Sun, 14 Oct 2007, Aryeh M. Friedman wrote:

> Lon Levy wrote:
> > "> Many of us use Scheme as a first language
> >
> >>
> >>
> >
> > What is worse too much semantic overhead or the syntax from hell??!?!?!?"
> >
> > Did you ever really learn Scheme?  The syntax is mostly prefix notation.  There are about five more elements of syntax that I teach my
>
> Pre/postfix belongs in compilers and very old hp calculators only!!!
> All humor aside anything but infix requires an amazing amount of
> conceptual conversion between problem and code space.   That plus having
> to count parens basically rules out any lisp variant in my mind.
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