Pseudocode in the wikipedia
James Stroud
jstroud at mbi.ucla.edu
Fri Apr 1 15:15:35 EST 2005
Is anybody else bothered by those stupid pascal-like ":=" assignment
operators?
Maybe, for the sake of adding more variety to the world, wiki should come up
with a new assignment operator, like "==". I like that one because then it
could really be original:
if (bob = 4):
bob == bob + 2
See how nice that looks? Then we could have people who are used to python and
c and perl complaining that "=" is for comparison and "==" is for assignment.
Then the wikilitests would say "hey, man, part and parcel of being a
programmer is getting assignment and comparison straight--and not making
typos, you buffoon". But then the guys who have to program in a bunch of
languages would point out how the wikilitests only psuedo code in wiki--so
they would never even run the code they wrote. And then some understanding
fellow would recommend a wiki precompiler to catch "==" inside of "if"
statements, but then someone else would say that it would limit the
expressiveness of wiki language:
bob == (carol = 2):
if bob = (bob or carol):
bob == 4
But no one could figure out what bob was supposed to equal anyway. And then
someone would say something about a "Turing Machine", just to show that
theoretically, the above code could be understood by something theoretical.
James
On Friday 01 April 2005 11:23 am, Terry Reedy wrote:
> <bearophileHUGS at lycos.com> wrote in message
> news:1112362451.848227.208120 at z14g2000cwz.googlegroups.com...
>
> > The free wikipedia is adopting a standard pseudocode:
> > http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia_talk:Wikicode/Specification
--
James Stroud, Ph.D.
UCLA-DOE Institute for Genomics and Proteomics
Box 951570
Los Angeles, CA 90095
http://www.jamesstroud.com/
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