Matt Whiting wrote:
wrote:
Matt Whiting wrote:
wrote:
Matt Whiting wrote:
wrote:
Matt Whiting wrote:
Maxwell wrote:
"Matt Whiting" wrote in message
...
Maxwell wrote:
"Mxsmanic" wrote in message
...
So how did they manage to write decent programs? Errors like that are
very
serious in software engineering.

A question like that makes me really doubt that you have ever done any
programming regardless of your insistance. Programming languages have
little to do with spelling and grammar skills, and much more to do with
syntax and structure.
Really? Every Pascal, FORTRAN, C, and COBOL compiler I ever used was
quite picky about spelling and syntax is just a subset of grammar.
Then you are as clueless on this one as he is.
But still much less clueless as you. Misspell a previously defined
variable in a language with implicit variable declaration and tell me
how well your program works.
Well, that's true enough, but does any programming language care if
you declare something response, resp, Respond, RESP, rasponse, or
anything else which may, or may not, be similar or the same as a
natural language word?

I don't know all programming languages so I can't say, but I know that
the ones that I've used were quite picky about spelling a given variable
the same way EVERY time you use it. Misspell it once and bad things can
happen, especially in languages like Fortran that will happily create
a new variable for you and carry on.
Yes, that is one of the failings of languages that don't require you
to declare variables.

But that has nothing to do with using an english word for a variable
name and not spelling the english word correctly.

True, but the recent discussion wasn't about the English language it was
about the erroneous statement above: "Programming languages have little
to do with spelling and grammar skills, and much more to do with syntax
and structure."

Saying that spelling doesn't matter much with respect to programming
languages is just flat out false. Misspelling a symbol name in many
programming languages is far more serious than misspelling an English
word in a sentence. In the former, this will cause a compile error if
you are lucky and a very obscure run-time error if you aren't lucky. In
the latter, it makes you look illiterate, but often the reader still
knows what you meant by the context. Most compilers aren't very good at
using context. :-)

Well, I know a lot of programmers that have zip point squat for "spelling
and grammar skills", but are really good programmers.

But since the words they can't spell correctly are always spelled the
same incorrect way, it doesn' matter.

I just don't let them write the end user documentation.


They obviously aren't using a language with reserved words...

Non sequitur.

The reserved words in most languages are the same world wide and a small
subset of English words.

A programmer doesn't need to know English, how to spell other English
words, or anything else about English to write a working program.

If a non-English speaking programmer writes a program that has a
user defined identifier that means to him "acknowledge" and he spells
it (consistently) in the program as "iknoledge", it doesn't matter.

--
Jim Pennino

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