I agree that what a language needs is legibility. From my point of view, C++
lost that long time ago ... but this is a different history.

Talking about legibility, I would like to know why the directives sitll need
the simbol #. I know that they are interpreted during parsing time and so on
but I think that many of our scenes have more lines beginning with # than
the opposite. Belive me, with some keyboards, it is a difficult symbol.

Why not writing:
declare i=0;
while (i<10)
    sphere {(0,0,i) i/2}
    i=i+1;
end

There should be many problems for the interpreter?

Thx,
Groucho

"Doppelganger" <ped### [at] netcabopt> wrote in message
news:411ed9f8$1@news.povray.org...
> >More comfortable work = more time to concentrate on picture itself.
>
> this is only true for short term work. though I'm not a POV-Ray expert, my
> experience with other languages in which shorthand syntax exists makes me
> say that it's only "comfortable work" for 2 or 3 lines worth of code in
> every 500. The code with dense shorthand easily becomes cluttered and
> impossible to read.
>
> Giving an example of how bad short hand can be in Mathematica code (and I
> tried using this sort of code for serious programming -- to give up
> reasonably soon afterwards):
>
> Compare:
>
> f[x_]=x^2;
> list=Map[f,{1,2,3,4}];
> Apply[Plus,list];
> list
>
> With:
>
> Plus@@((#^2)&/@{1,2,3,4})
>
> they both get the list {1, 2, 3, 4}, square all entries, and sum all the
> entries. Which code segment do you think you'd understand for what it is 2
> months after you'd written it? I had to rtfm to get the second one right
to
> make this point (though I wrote fluently like it when I used it), whereas
> the first one came naturally.
>
> > > Because it is a bloat-feature based in a bloat mentality
> >
> > ?
>
> it's a non-feature. It's not necessary, hardly useful, and it makes (as
> illustrated) for more hard than good.
>
>

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