<div dir="ltr"><div class="gmail_default" style="font-family:arial,helvetica,sans-serif">Though the idea of bridging is nice, I doubt that it is as simple as just a question of providing syntactic sugar for the "scientist". Any scientist worth calling himself such, can deal with a spelled out lambda as well as with λ. I think the problem is rather that some mathematicians don't care for issues of complexity and implementation, and as you say some software engineers don't understand enough mathematics. That said, a prettyfying solution can make some algorithms look more compact, that perhaps may help in the mental visualization during development.</div>
<div class="gmail_default" style="font-family:arial,helvetica,sans-serif"><br></div><div class="gmail_default" style="font-family:arial,helvetica,sans-serif">After all, what is the point of having a unicode supporting system, if we don't make use of all those nice glyphs available to us. :-)</div>
</div><div class="gmail_extra"><br><br><div class="gmail_quote">On Thu, Jun 6, 2013 at 12:13 PM, Oleg Goldshmidt <span dir="ltr"><<a href="mailto:pub@goldshmidt.org" target="_blank">pub@goldshmidt.org</a>></span> wrote:<br>
<blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0 0 0 .8ex;border-left:1px #ccc solid;padding-left:1ex"><div class="im"><br>
> Is this a good idea? Probably absolutely not, but it is quite fun. :-)<br>
<br>
</div>Besides being cool clean fun, I wonder - only semi-jokingly - if it may<br>
be useful to streamline the interface between "algorithmists" and<br>
"developers". In many organizations "scientists" are supposed to produce<br>
algorithms in the form of pseudocode that "developers" are supposed to<br>
translate to working code. Stuff is often lost in translation, the<br>
pseudocode is found to be incomplete or buggy or completely<br>
unimplementable, the developers are found to be mathematicaly illiterate<br>
or worse, and so on.<br>
<br>
So can, for the beneft of companies who employ scientists who cannot<br>
program but know maths and corresponding notation alongside developers<br>
who know the syntax but can't figure out what is wanted of them, the gap<br>
be bridged? Can the "mathematician" write down the algo in pseudocode,<br>
using agreed upon conventions, then "unfontify" it and check that it a)<br>
compiles; b) produces correct output for given inputs thus testing for<br>
bugs ike off-by-one tha can easily crawl into unrunnable pseudocode? If<br>
the pseudocode contains some statements that the "pretty-unfontified"<br>
version's compiler barfs on that likely means that the algo is<br>
incomplete and some operation/function/whatever is un(der)?defined. This<br>
will be flagged before it aggravates the coder's life, etc.<br>
<br>
It's fun to muse, not just to write elisp. Thumbs up for knowing to<br>
enjoy yourselves, regardless of utility.<br>
<span class="HOEnZb"><font color="#888888"><br>
--<br>
Oleg Goldshmidt | <a href="mailto:pub@goldshmidt.org">pub@goldshmidt.org</a><br>
</font></span></blockquote></div><br></div>