The whole issue of the "secondary" is worth a thought. Essentially
you can make an almost continuous series of steps from commenting,
formatting, syntactic sugar, syntax, bytecode to the numerous levels
of semantics such as memory patterns or DAC signal. On each level
there is representation.
>2009/10/18 alex <alex_at_slab.org>:
>> From what you say I guess in most languages you give things names to
>> help you remember what they're for, and in pd and max you give them
>> shapes. The interpreter doesn't care what names or shapes you give
>> them, but they're near essential for human understanding. Actually
>> from this perspective the visual/textual distinction is clear, it's
>> not in the computation but in the presentation of it.
>
>I looked into this a bit more, others have noticed the analog between
>arrangement in visual languages and variable names, indentation etc in
>textual ones. It's called "secondary notation".
>
>The section of secondary notation in this paper is quite interesting:
> http://homepage.ntlworld.com/greenery/workStuff/Papers/UsabilityVPs.PDF
>
>for example:
>
>"One of our informants reported "I quite often spend an hour or two
>just moving boxes and
>wires around, with no change in functionality, to make it that much
>more comprehensible when I come
>back to it." It is hard to imagine a Pascal programmer having to spend
>an hour or two doing nothing but
>re-arranging the components of the program to make it comprehensible.
>Text-based programmers are
>aware of the need for white space and indenting, but usually they
>solve it as they go along. (On the other
>hand, text-based programmers might spend that much time going back
>over a program and inserting com-
>ments. Maybe this is a case of swings and roundabouts.)"
>
>
>alex
>
>--
>http://yaxu.org/
--
.
Received on Sat Oct 31 2009 - 15:43:36 GMT