APL-like python for fun

[Dov Grobgeld]

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.

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. :-)


On Thu, Jun 6, 2013 at 12:13 PM, Oleg Goldshmidt <pub at goldshmidt.org> wrote:

>
> > Is this a good idea? Probably absolutely not, but it is quite fun. :-)
>
> Besides being cool clean fun, I wonder - only semi-jokingly - if it may
> be useful to streamline the interface between "algorithmists" and
> "developers". In many organizations "scientists" are supposed to produce
> algorithms in the form of pseudocode that "developers" are supposed to
> translate to working code. Stuff is often lost in translation, the
> pseudocode is found to be incomplete or buggy or completely
> unimplementable, the developers are found to be mathematicaly illiterate
> or worse, and so on.
>
> So can, for the beneft of companies who employ scientists who cannot
> program but know maths and corresponding notation alongside developers
> who know the syntax but can't figure out what is wanted of them, the gap
> be bridged? Can the "mathematician" write down the algo in pseudocode,
> using agreed upon conventions, then "unfontify" it and check that it a)
> compiles; b) produces correct output for given inputs thus testing for
> bugs ike off-by-one tha can easily crawl into unrunnable pseudocode? If
> the pseudocode contains some statements that the "pretty-unfontified"
> version's compiler barfs on that likely means that the algo is
> incomplete and some operation/function/whatever is un(der)?defined. This
> will be flagged before it aggravates the coder's life, etc.
>
> It's fun to muse, not just to write elisp. Thumbs up for knowing to
> enjoy yourselves, regardless of utility.
>
> --
> Oleg Goldshmidt | pub at goldshmidt.org
>
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