Color sensitivity? No, BUT....

[Barry Margolin]

In article <1265 at l.cc.purdue.edu> cik at l.cc.purdue.edu (Herman Rubin) writes:
>In article <1318 at frog.UUCP>, john at frog.UUCP (John Woods) writes:
>> And then again, having fonts be significant in variable names would make
>> it easy to have variables like "script-G" that pop up in Quantum Mechanics...
>Why not?  Mathematicians have been using fonts and foreign alphabets for
>hundreds of years without confusion.

The last time a mathematician was allowed to design a programming
language we ended up with APL, one of the most unreadable languages
around (please, no flames from the APL afficionados, it's just my
opinion).

Mathematicians like to use single letters for everything, and they use
character styles in place of spelling things out.  I think they've
gotten into this habit because they tend to do lots of work on
blackboards, and spelling things out would slow them down too much.
It also allows them to fit more onto a page, and much of mathematics
needs to be published.

However, programming doesn't have the same constraints.  When typing,
it would probably take just as long to type the word "real" as to type
a script R (you presumably have to do some extra operations to get into
and out of script mode).  Most computer programs aren't published, so
minimizing page count is not normally important (when programs and
algorithms are published in journals, they unfortunately tend to have
short variable names, probably for the same reason as in mathematics).

Barry Margolin
Thinking Machines Corp.

barmar at think.com
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