From: Junio C Hamano <junkio@cox.net>
To: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@osdl.org>
Cc: git@vger.kernel.org
Subject: [OT] if (4 < number_of_children) you're in trouble
Date: Sat, 28 May 2005 00:55:44 -0700 [thread overview]
Message-ID: <7vfyw7yebj.fsf_-_@assigned-by-dhcp.cox.net> (raw)
In-Reply-To: <7v3bscqdlr.fsf@assigned-by-dhcp.cox.net> (Junio C. Hamano's message of "Tue, 24 May 2005 18:49:20 -0700")
I received this from my mentor tonight. Although I said I am
not going to discuss this issue anymore, with his permission, I
would like to share where the "visual order" came from with the
list.
From: Paul Eggert <eggert@CS.UCLA.EDU>
Subject: Re: FYI: comparison order in boolean expressions
To: Junio C Hamano <junkio@cox.net>
Date: Sat, 28 May 2005 00:28:31 -0700
> http://marc.theaimsgroup.com/?l=git&m=111698274620068&w=2
Thanks! That made my day.
You can forward the following to that mailing list if you like:
I learned the "textual order should reflect actual order" convention
from D. Val Schorre, one of the best programmers I've ever worked
with. Val was credited by Donald E. Knuth as the first person to
seriously advocate goto-less programming. In 1974 Knuth wrote:
When I met Schorre in 1963, he told me of his radical ideas, and I
didn't believe they would work.... In 1964 I challenged him to
write a program for the eight-queens problem without using go to
statements, and he responded with a program using recursive
procedures and Boolean variables, very much like the program later
published independently by Wirth.
I was still not convinced....
Knuth's reaction to Schorre's ideas on avoiding gotos sounds a bit
like Linus's reaction to Schorre's ideas on comparison order, no?
Anyway, here's the reference, if you'd like to find out how Knuth's
story ends:
Donald E. Knuth
Structured Programming with go to Statements
ACM Computing Surveys 6, 4 (December 1974), 261-301.
http://portal.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=356640
PS. The idea that textual form should reflect the underlying reality
goes all the way back to Gottfried Leibniz's alphabet of human thought
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alphabet_of_human_thought>. Leibniz was
a brilliant designer of notations -- one of the best the world has
ever seen -- and it is amusing to speculate what he would have done
with programming had he been born some time in the past few decades.
(Personally I suspect that Leibniz would have liked "1 < x".)
next prev parent reply other threads:[~2005-05-28 7:53 UTC|newest]
Thread overview: 17+ messages / expand[flat|nested] mbox.gz Atom feed top
2005-05-25 0:47 [PATCH] diff-cache path restriction fix Junio C Hamano
2005-05-25 1:00 ` Linus Torvalds
2005-05-25 1:05 ` Junio C Hamano
2005-05-25 1:24 ` Linus Torvalds
2005-05-25 1:49 ` Junio C Hamano
2005-05-25 2:16 ` Russ Allbery
2005-05-25 2:33 ` Junio C Hamano
2005-05-25 3:04 ` Linus Torvalds
2005-05-25 3:22 ` Junio C Hamano
2005-05-25 9:06 ` Ingo Molnar
2005-05-25 17:07 ` Linus Torvalds
2005-05-25 19:14 ` Junio C Hamano
2005-05-25 19:17 ` Thomas Glanzmann
2005-05-25 20:31 ` Matthias Urlichs
2005-05-28 7:55 ` Junio C Hamano [this message]
2005-05-25 8:31 ` Ingo Molnar
2005-05-25 16:02 ` Florian Weimer
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