On 9/6/07, nicolas cellier <ncellier at ifrance.com> wrote:
>
> Yeah, on the other hand, try to do math in spoken language and see how
> far and fast you go in demonstrations.
>
> Mathematical notations is a huge progress to express complex ideas in
> synthetic form. I'm sure the language changes our way of thinking. Math
> language is a winner to do math.
>
> Could math language really achieve this goal without being contextual?
> I doubt it.

Yes, math language is very good at what it does.  As you have probably
noticed in this list, I very much like Haskell, which is very good for
mathematical things and the most concise language there is today (that
is, concise, not terse.  You can read short Haskell code).

But we already had a language that is taking those ideas of math and
seeing how far they can go with it.  I see no reason to try and cram
it into Smalltalk too.  Smalltalk went on the other side:  make it as
simple as possible and see how far we get.

I am not against Smalltalk changing.  But changes should take us
forward (from the perspective of the language), not backward.