ok what are the rules
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Shog9 wrote:
The Grand Negus wrote: Polymorphism built into the current Plain English compiler. And polymorphism is one of the tenants of OO as well. Indeed, while it is quite useful in a purely procedural language, it is nearly essential in an OO one, as without it you quickly end up with: The Grand Negus wrote: "number.converttostring" or "string.converttonumber" or "abstract.convert(number,string)" string var = number There's no reason why the assignment operator shouldn't act differently based on context.
Yes, yes. But you've hidden the problem, not solved it. To do the conversion, does the assignment operator call "number.converttostring" or "string.converttonumber" or "abstract.convert(number,string)"? In other words, where is the conversion function defined? (And please don't say "under the assignment operator object" because there are clearly two different operations here: assignment of a value to a compatible container is not the same thing as the conversion of a value from one representation to another.)
By the way: you might get a kick out of this interview with Stroustrup. Lots of grumbling about people who insist on putting everything in a class hierarchy. The C++ Style Sweet Spot[^]:
I've been preaching this song for the better part of 20 years. But people got very keen on putting everything in classes and hierarchies. I've seen the Date problem solved by having a base class Date with some operations on it and the data protected, with utility functions provided by deriving a new class and adding the utility functions. You get really messy systems like that, and there's no reason for having the utility functions in derived classes. You want the utility functions to the side so you can combine them freely. How else do I get your utility functions and my utility functions also? The utility functions you wrote are independent from the ones I wrote, and so they should be independent in the code. If I derive from class Date, and you derive from class Date, a third person won't be able to easily use both of our utility functions, because we have built dependencies in that didn't need to be there. So you can overdo this class hierarchy stuff.
:)
---- I just want you to be happy; That's my only little wish...
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I agree with your statement about C#. I'm fond of C++ however. I'll admit I'm biased (as I'm a C++ programmer) but a multi-padagram language like C++ is just what is needed if you're going to use multiple programming padagrams. I don't agree with your statement that, "you end up with a kludge like C++". It is a hard language to master but flexibility has a price and you can make a mess in any language; plain English included. You don't have to use or understand every language feature to use it (the langauge). Many people use C++ without writing template code for example. The longer you use a langauge the more features you tend to use.
Steve
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By the way: you might get a kick out of this interview with Stroustrup. Lots of grumbling about people who insist on putting everything in a class hierarchy. The C++ Style Sweet Spot[^]:
I've been preaching this song for the better part of 20 years. But people got very keen on putting everything in classes and hierarchies. I've seen the Date problem solved by having a base class Date with some operations on it and the data protected, with utility functions provided by deriving a new class and adding the utility functions. You get really messy systems like that, and there's no reason for having the utility functions in derived classes. You want the utility functions to the side so you can combine them freely. How else do I get your utility functions and my utility functions also? The utility functions you wrote are independent from the ones I wrote, and so they should be independent in the code. If I derive from class Date, and you derive from class Date, a third person won't be able to easily use both of our utility functions, because we have built dependencies in that didn't need to be there. So you can overdo this class hierarchy stuff.
:)
---- I just want you to be happy; That's my only little wish...
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Shog9 wrote:
Does it matter? This is a concern for the implementation, but why should the programmer wishing to convert a number to a string care about such details?
Because, I thought, we were talking about the guy was implementing the function as well as the guy who uses it. It's easy to make a case for something if you leave out one whole side of the story.
Shog9 wrote:
Personally, i wouldn't implement it as a member of either string or number - such status should be reserved for operations clearly in one domain or the other, which a conversion is not.
Agreed, but the "personally" at the beginning of your sentence supports my point - with objects there's a choice and the "right" answer isn't clear (to all). With Plain English, the question never arises. Furthermore, there are many such operations that are not "clearly in one domain or the other". Is "Write a string on the console" part of the string domain, or the console domain, or both, or neither? How about "Write a string to the printer"? In a true object-oriented language, such operations, if not placed under something, require the addition of "abstract" constructs and additional keywords, etc. But Plain English handles all of these cases, naturally and efficiently, with no additional parts. And the guy with the fewest parts wins, right, Occam?
Shog9 wrote:
I also feel it's important to distinguish a conversion (which should be reversible with no loss of information if at all possible) and string formatting (which should offer much more control over the output).
Okay with us. In the current version of Plain English, we typically use "put" for assignments (with any necessary, implied, reversable conversions); we use the word "convert" otherwise, and underneath the "puts". So "put 3 into a string" will include an automatic call to the appropriate "convert" function; "convert a number to pdf em units given an emsquare number and a font" does the conversion directly. Both statements compile and run as you see them.
Shog9 wrote:
I strongly feel conversion operators to be a weak spot in OO languages such as Java or C#, and much prefer the C++ design (which offers a rich set of options, including the ability to define a conversion procedure external to any class).
As I said in another p
The Grand Negus wrote:
Because, I thought, we were talking about the guy was implementing the function as well as the guy who uses it. It's easy to make a case for something if you leave out one whole side of the story.
If we can accept that the conversion be made implicit based on context, then it doesn't matter what the guy implementing it does. He might put the conversion under a class or namespace hierarchy, standalone, or even build it into the compiler as a block of anonymous machine code spit out wherever such a conversion is required. It shouldn't make a bit of difference to the user.
The Grand Negus wrote:
In a true object-oriented language
Ah, well - i've no use for a pure OO language. I'm sure such things are of academic interest, but such constraints do little for me. OO is great in certain areas, for certain tasks... but i've no interest in trying to make everything an object.
---- I just want you to be happy; That's my only little wish...
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The Grand Negus wrote:
I think it's the term "utility function" that gives the lie to the object approach.
At the end of the day, you still need something to get the work done. It's at the point where it stops being a useful organizing technique and starts to intrude upon my efforts to actually accomplish anything that i abandon OO.
---- I just want you to be happy; That's my only little wish...
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But think a moment. English can be used to write anything from a love letter, to a post on CodeProject, to a native-code generating compiler. Why bother with anything else?
The Grand Negus wrote:
But think a moment. English can be used to write anything from a love letter, to a post on CodeProject, to a native-code generating compiler. Why bother with anything else?
For the same reason mathematicians don't: for some purposes English is either too verbose, too vague (open to many interpretation), too hard to manipulate or all three. In a mathematical proof for example there’ll be both English and formal symbolic notation. It’s not a matter of one being better then the other: just that they both have their strengths and weaknesses and you have to know when to use which. It’s similar to the multi-padagram discussion we were having before; when all you've got is a hammer, everything looks like a nail.
Steve
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yes you are true that i didn't read or not see as many things as you did but i don't blindly believe what is been said and don't just stick to one thing i am open for changes and not rigid for what i believe i can see things from different perspective and changes my self with time
The Grand Negus wrote:
when General Motors was the clear winner in the evolution of the automobile industry, and the thought of a Japanese car on American highways was nothing but a joke. More to the point, however, I remember when the hierarchical/network approach to database was almost universally accepted as the best. In the "process of evolution", as you call it, this approach was not only winning, but had virtually won; it was backed by IBM and every other major player at the time and no one else stood a chance. But then along came Dr. Codd with a five-page paper describing the "spartan simplicity" of his relational approach, and things changed.
yes that happened but you see a fact that some thing more flexible and some thing new has taken over procedural coding had its own golden but it gets a fair competitor in designing and users got a net tool to work with few user just denied to use the new tool and stick to the older one saying that it will not work ( oop is whatever you say) and some people used them both the difference can be seen it the market the simply procedural languages changes ( implement the concepts of oop ) to survive now dinosaurs do you believe few floods killed them all or it was there inability to change as you are more experienced than me have you heard of ice age humans survived from it any many more disasters by the way we were talking about oop and procedural ok this time my point is the price difference between the two (supporting languages) :)
it is good to be important but it is more important to be good
Amar Chaudhary wrote:
now dinosaurs do you believe few floods killed them all or it was there inability to change as you are more experienced than me have you heard of ice age humans survived from it any many more disasters
There's a lot of evidence that the dinosaurs were unable to recover after a watery cataclysm. But it's hard to get good data from so far back. The problem with cataclysms is that organisms perfectly adapted to one environment are often not at all suited to another - like the environment that emerges following a cataclysm. It's like training yourself to be a chess champion and then having to deal with a bully in the park who kicks the board over. As Solomon said, "I have seen under the sun that the race is not always to the swift, nor the battle to the strong, nor bread to the wise, nor riches to men of understanding... but time and chance happens to them all".
Amar Chaudhary wrote:
ok this time my point is the price difference between the two (supporting languages)
I'm not sure what you're asking here. But if you're asking if we can write a program better, faster and cheaper in Plain English than in any other language, the answer is a definite "yes".
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The Grand Negus wrote:
Because, I thought, we were talking about the guy was implementing the function as well as the guy who uses it. It's easy to make a case for something if you leave out one whole side of the story.
If we can accept that the conversion be made implicit based on context, then it doesn't matter what the guy implementing it does. He might put the conversion under a class or namespace hierarchy, standalone, or even build it into the compiler as a block of anonymous machine code spit out wherever such a conversion is required. It shouldn't make a bit of difference to the user.
The Grand Negus wrote:
In a true object-oriented language
Ah, well - i've no use for a pure OO language. I'm sure such things are of academic interest, but such constraints do little for me. OO is great in certain areas, for certain tasks... but i've no interest in trying to make everything an object.
---- I just want you to be happy; That's my only little wish...
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The Grand Negus wrote:
I think it's the term "utility function" that gives the lie to the object approach.
At the end of the day, you still need something to get the work done. It's at the point where it stops being a useful organizing technique and starts to intrude upon my efforts to actually accomplish anything that i abandon OO.
---- I just want you to be happy; That's my only little wish...
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Shog9 wrote:
but i've no interest in trying to make everything an object.
Good. But how about making everything Plain English? It's the language millions use every day to program their dogs!
But dogs have intelligence whereas computers don't. If you tell a computer to do something stupid it will go off and do the wrong thing at 3 GHz and possibly make a hell of a mess before you can stop it. A dog on the other hand will use his intelligence to read between the lines of your incomplete description (a dog probably wouldn’t understand a more rigid description anyway) and figure out what you actually want as opposed to what you said.
Steve
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Amar Chaudhary wrote:
now dinosaurs do you believe few floods killed them all or it was there inability to change as you are more experienced than me have you heard of ice age humans survived from it any many more disasters
There's a lot of evidence that the dinosaurs were unable to recover after a watery cataclysm. But it's hard to get good data from so far back. The problem with cataclysms is that organisms perfectly adapted to one environment are often not at all suited to another - like the environment that emerges following a cataclysm. It's like training yourself to be a chess champion and then having to deal with a bully in the park who kicks the board over. As Solomon said, "I have seen under the sun that the race is not always to the swift, nor the battle to the strong, nor bread to the wise, nor riches to men of understanding... but time and chance happens to them all".
Amar Chaudhary wrote:
ok this time my point is the price difference between the two (supporting languages)
I'm not sure what you're asking here. But if you're asking if we can write a program better, faster and cheaper in Plain English than in any other language, the answer is a definite "yes".
The Grand Negus wrote:
we can write a program better, faster and cheaper in Plain English than in any other language, the answer is a definite "yes"
Uh huh, sure :rolleyes:
If you try to write that in English, I might be able to understand more than a fraction of it. - Guffa
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The Grand Negus wrote:
But think a moment. English can be used to write anything from a love letter, to a post on CodeProject, to a native-code generating compiler. Why bother with anything else?
For the same reason mathematicians don't: for some purposes English is either too verbose, too vague (open to many interpretation), too hard to manipulate or all three. In a mathematical proof for example there’ll be both English and formal symbolic notation. It’s not a matter of one being better then the other: just that they both have their strengths and weaknesses and you have to know when to use which. It’s similar to the multi-padagram discussion we were having before; when all you've got is a hammer, everything looks like a nail.
Steve
Stephen Hewitt wrote:
In a mathematical proof for example there’ll be both English and formal symbolic notation. It’s not a matter of one being better then the other: just that they both have their strengths and weaknesses and you have to know when to use which.
Agreed. But note something important here. The framework of such a proof is almost always a natural language, like English. The formulae are written in a specialized sub-language of the natural language. In other words, English is "bigger" than mathematical notation. Not better, bigger. It's easy, for example, to think of American English including the way Americans typically write numbers or simple equations - it's hard to imagine the reverse. And that's what we're proposing regarding Plain English (and which we've spelled out in other places). Our Plain English Machine, the PAL 3000, will understand not only English, but various forms of formulae and other programming languages as well. But the machine's native tongue will be English. And we're emphasizing this part of the problem because, frankly, the other parts (how to parse equations and compile C#) have already been solved.
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But dogs have intelligence whereas computers don't. If you tell a computer to do something stupid it will go off and do the wrong thing at 3 GHz and possibly make a hell of a mess before you can stop it. A dog on the other hand will use his intelligence to read between the lines of your incomplete description (a dog probably wouldn’t understand a more rigid description anyway) and figure out what you actually want as opposed to what you said.
Steve
Stephen Hewitt wrote:
If you tell a computer to do something stupid it will go off and do the wrong thing at 3 GHz and possibly make a hell of a mess before you can stop it. A dog on the other hand will use his intelligence to read between the lines of your incomplete description (a dog probably wouldn’t understand a more rigid description anyway) and figure out what you actually want as opposed to what you said.
Not always. When I was a kid, the drummer in our band liked to put a speaker at one end of a room, grab a microphone, and stand at the other end of the room: then call his dog. The poor beast would run in circles (at 3 Hz) in the middle of the room until one of the other band members would take pity and turn off the amplifier. What you say is a matter of degree, not kind. Our compiler, in many situations, can figure out what you actually want as opposed to what you said even in its current incarnation. For example, if you say "Draw a circle at the screen" instead of "on the screen", it will figure it out. If you tell it to draw a "frame", it will reduce "frame" to "rectangle" and call the appropriate routine. If you fail to specify a color, it will pick its favorite - not unlike a kid.
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...and thinking about the inspiring prose you used to describe your proposed wall between the VB and C# forums: Were you home schooled? Or did you just play Zork a lot?
The Grand Negus wrote:
Were you home schooled? Or did you just play Zork a lot?
Can't it be both? ;) Yeah, i was homeschooled, and as a result of this spent a lot of time reading pretty much everything i could get my hands on, which gives me a fairly large amount of source material to draw on when i'm in the mood to goof off a bit. I don't consider myself a particularly good writer, of course - it takes me far, far too long to put my thoughts down, and a lot of editing before i'm ever happy with it. Still, i can put out some entertaining documentation on occasion...
---- I just want you to be happy; That's my only little wish...
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Stephen Hewitt wrote:
In a mathematical proof for example there’ll be both English and formal symbolic notation. It’s not a matter of one being better then the other: just that they both have their strengths and weaknesses and you have to know when to use which.
Agreed. But note something important here. The framework of such a proof is almost always a natural language, like English. The formulae are written in a specialized sub-language of the natural language. In other words, English is "bigger" than mathematical notation. Not better, bigger. It's easy, for example, to think of American English including the way Americans typically write numbers or simple equations - it's hard to imagine the reverse. And that's what we're proposing regarding Plain English (and which we've spelled out in other places). Our Plain English Machine, the PAL 3000, will understand not only English, but various forms of formulae and other programming languages as well. But the machine's native tongue will be English. And we're emphasizing this part of the problem because, frankly, the other parts (how to parse equations and compile C#) have already been solved.
The Grand Negus wrote:
The framework of such a proof is almost always a natural language, like English.
In my experience (some maths at University before I switched to computers) this isn't the case: the English spells out a vague high level description of the problem and highlights points of interest, cites references and such. The actual body of the proof is in symbolic notation. In mathematics this is almost always the case.
Steve
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The Grand Negus wrote:
we can write a program better, faster and cheaper in Plain English than in any other language, the answer is a definite "yes"
Uh huh, sure :rolleyes:
If you try to write that in English, I might be able to understand more than a fraction of it. - Guffa
PaulC1972 wrote:
The Grand Negus wrote: we can write a program better, faster and cheaper in Plain English than in any other language, the answer is a definite "yes" Uh huh, sure
Well, we should know since we've written major programs in various assembler languages, in Fortran, COBOL, Pascal, Prolog, LISP, C, C++, C#, a number of our own languages, and Plain English. And Plain English is our language of choice. Not because we invented it, but because of all the languages we've used, it works the best. Think a minute - if it didn't work the best, we wouldn't have released it, like we didn't release the other five languages we developed over the years. When those languages proved to be only marginally better (or sometimes even worse), we went back to the drawing board.
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Shog9 wrote:
but i've no interest in trying to make everything an object.
Good. But how about making everything Plain English? It's the language millions use every day to program their dogs!
The Grand Negus wrote:
But how about making everything Plain English?
To be honest, I wouldn't mind taking a look. But then, there are at least two other languages on my "idle time todo list" already, and they've both taking a back seat to other things lately (i'm baking bread right now; somehow, that's more satisfying today ;) ).
---- I just want you to be happy; That's my only little wish...
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PaulC1972 wrote:
The Grand Negus wrote: we can write a program better, faster and cheaper in Plain English than in any other language, the answer is a definite "yes" Uh huh, sure
Well, we should know since we've written major programs in various assembler languages, in Fortran, COBOL, Pascal, Prolog, LISP, C, C++, C#, a number of our own languages, and Plain English. And Plain English is our language of choice. Not because we invented it, but because of all the languages we've used, it works the best. Think a minute - if it didn't work the best, we wouldn't have released it, like we didn't release the other five languages we developed over the years. When those languages proved to be only marginally better (or sometimes even worse), we went back to the drawing board.
The Grand Negus wrote:
of all the languages we've used, it works the best
Can it solve a problem like the Traveling Salesman Problem in the worst case scenario, in linear time complexity?
If you try to write that in English, I might be able to understand more than a fraction of it. - Guffa
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The Grand Negus wrote:
The framework of such a proof is almost always a natural language, like English.
In my experience (some maths at University before I switched to computers) this isn't the case: the English spells out a vague high level description of the problem and highlights points of interest, cites references and such. The actual body of the proof is in symbolic notation. In mathematics this is almost always the case.
Steve
Stephen Hewitt wrote:
In my experience (some maths at University before I switched to computers) this isn't the case: the English spells out a vague high level description of the problem and highlights points of interest, cites references and such. The actual body of the proof is in symbolic notation. In mathematics this is almost always the case.
You've got to be misunderstanding what I mean by framework. Let's try a different example. In what language are all the articles on this site written? C? C++? C#? VB? No! They're all written in English with examples written in these sub-languages. Back to the other example. My calculus book is written in English. It is not a German calculus book, it is an English calculus book, though it probably contains the same or similar formulae. The "framework" is English: the title, the preface, the chapter headings, the introductions, the explanations of the formulae, the problem statements, etc.
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The Grand Negus wrote:
But how about making everything Plain English?
To be honest, I wouldn't mind taking a look. But then, there are at least two other languages on my "idle time todo list" already, and they've both taking a back seat to other things lately (i'm baking bread right now; somehow, that's more satisfying today ;) ).
---- I just want you to be happy; That's my only little wish...
Shog9 wrote:
i'm baking bread right now; somehow, that's more satisfying today ).
Well, at least the bread isn't baking itself! But how about that dog analogy? Why don't people use, say, C# to program their dogs? Why do they always just go for the thing they know best?