in reply to Re: Operator Precedence
in thread Operator Precedence
No theoretical axes to grind
Natural languages are used by people who for the most part don't give a rip how elegant the design of their language is. Except for a few writers striving to make a point in the most efficient way possible, ordinary folks scatter all sorts of redundancy throughout their communication to make sure of being understood. They use whatever words come to hand to get their point across, and work at it till they beat the thing to death. Normally this ain't a problem. They're quite willing to learn a new word occasionally if they see that it will be useful, but unlike lawyers or computer scientists, they feel little need to define lots of new words before they say what they want to say. In terms of computer languages, this argues for predefining the commonly used concepts so that people don't feel the need to make so many definitions. Quite a few Perl scripts contain no definitions at all. I dare you to find a C++ program without a definition.