On Mon, Jul 6, 2009 at 3:54 AM, Neil Harrisusenet@tonal.clara.co.uk wrote:
Consider the difference between the ease of writing, say, the Python-like print "%02x" % find(":", param[1]) or even the Lisp-like (print (fmt "%02x" (find ":" (param 1)))) compared to writing an "English-like" equivalent such as PRINT THE NUMBER OF CHARACTERS BEFORE THE FIRST OCCURRENCE OF THE COLON CHARACTER IN THE FIRST POSITIONAL PARAMETER FORMATTED AS A TWO-DIGIT ZERO-PADDED HEXADECIMAL NUMBER USING LOWERCASE LETTERS FOR THE HEX DIGITS A TO F
Your example is a bit unfair though, Neil. For one, how would it be parsed? Two, it only implies and does not explicitly state the "find/search" functionality you use in the examples.
Interestingly, this seems to follow the useful form for a teaching tool. Compromising between efficiently terse syntax and efficiently expressive natural language gets... ?
-Steve