Complexity and starting over on the JVM

Blake blake at kingdomrpg.com
Tue Feb 5 02:57:02 UTC 2008


On Mon, 04 Feb 2008 17:44:15 -0800, tim Rowledge <tim at rowledge.org> wrote:

"Personally I'd map plain shift-- (ie underscore) since  
underscores_have_no_place_in_variable_names."

[checks Bible]

Well, I'll be, Exodus 4:2.

"And the Lord said unto him, 'What is that in tine hand?' And he said,  
'It's a rod.' And Lord said, 'No, it's not. It's an underscore. What were  
thou planning to doeth with that?' And Moses said, 'Smite Egyptians?' And  
the Lord said, 'Thou wouldst use in thine variable names? As an affront to  
thy Lord?'"

Well, it only gets worse from there.

tim further wrote: "Similarly I'd use ordinary ^ for return on the  
keyboard."

Isn't that the way it works now?

I'm pro-left-arrow because it is completely unambiguous. I'm a long time  
Pascal-er (sticks tongue out at Tim) and truth is, when you use the  
colon-equal for assign, you end up mistakenly forgetting the colon. (Same  
problem in reverse in C with ==.) With Pascal (unlike C or Smalltalk),  
it's unlikely to compile when you screw it up. But it's a common novice  
problem and even sneaks up on old pros from time-to-time.




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