Laura's List - was Re: new years resolutions

[Andrew McGregor]

Don't the best notations look cleaner, have less 'line noise'-like glyphs 
in them?

A similar case would be standard musical notation vs midi event graph vs 
tablature.  The 'low level' versions (the latter two), while in some 
contexts both easier to learn and more direct, are far less powerful, and 
turn horrible in contexts where they don't really work. (and midi dumps are 
even worse, but that's the assembly language of digital music :-))

I was just comparing notations; of course what is being done with them is 
incomparable in some of those cases.  But that's like comparing different 
programming languages by looking at the syntax for different application 
domains.  Often that gives you a good idea how the language works, but 
often enough it doesn't.  (In the physics examples, I tried to pick cases 
where the applications didn't cloud the issue.)

Andrew

--On Wednesday, January 08, 2003 06:24:53 -0800 Michele Simionato 
<mis6 at pitt.edu> wrote:

> Andrew McGregor <andrew at indranet.co.nz> wrote in message
> news:<mailman.1041999800.30291.python-list at python.org>...
>> You can see the same thing in physics; contrast the notation of
>> classical  mechanics with the operator algebra formulation of QM.  Or
>> even the  classical vs relativistic notations for relativistic EM.
>>
>> I think the driving force is that a clean design takes more typing in
>> Perl,  whereas in Python it's usually much, much less.
>>
>> Andrew
>
> I understand you are saying "Python has a better syntax than Perl"
> and I have no problem with that. Then you pass to Physics examples and
> I am a little confused. Yes, the covariant notation for Maxwell
> equations is
> better than the nonrelativistic one, but in which sense the
> operatorial
> formalism is better than classical mechanics formalism ? They are
> interely
> different field of Physics, they cannot be compared ! Even so, I do
> not
> understand if you find more elegant the classical or the quantum
> notation,
> to me they are equally nice in their respective domain of validity.
> Of course,if I you speak of relativistic quantum fields, the best
> notation
> is the functional one.
>
> I-hope-I-have-not-scared-non-physicist-readers-ly yours,
>
> --
> Michele Simionato - Dept. of Physics and Astronomy
> 210 Allen Hall Pittsburgh PA 15260 U.S.A.
> Phone: 001-412-624-9041 Fax: 001-412-624-9163
> Home-page: http://www.phyast.pitt.edu/~micheles/
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>
>