Flight planning spreadsheet

"L Smith" wrote in message
...
Roger Long wrote:

Got it! Damn parentheses. What a difference a ( ) makes.


For me, one of the biggest pains in programming, and the cause of more
bugs and
other problems than anything else, is trying to get my parentheses in
the right places.
I've recently had the "opportunity" to work with the Scheme programming
language.
What's one of the key structural elements of its syntax? Parentheses!

Talk about a user-unfriendly language.


Yes, it is a big problem-- that is, until you're mind is sufficiently
expanded that you look at software in a whole new way and the parenthesis
"dissolve" into the background. It's almost a kind of a "magic-eye" sort of
thing, IYSWIM. Good luck, hope you eventually "get it"

Cheers,
John Clonts
Temple, Texas

Paul Tomblin wrote:
If you use a modern user friendly editor like "vi", you can just hit "%"
and it will take you to the matching paren, so you can see if they match
up correctly.

Be careful, the only thing worse than the high wing-low wing debate is the
vi-emacs debate.

- awh

(vi forever!)

Drew Hamilton ) wrote:
: Paul Tomblin wrote:
: If you use a modern user friendly editor like "vi", you can just hit "%"
: and it will take you to the matching paren, so you can see if they match
: up correctly.
:
: Be careful, the only thing worse than the high wing-low wing debate is the
: vi-emacs debate.
:
: - awh
:
: (vi forever!)
:

Or vi vs. VMS' edt debate, or unix vs. VMS.

--Jerry Leslie (my opinions are strictly my own)
Note: is invalid for email

John Clonts wrote:


Yes, it is a big problem-- that is, until you're mind is sufficiently
expanded that you look at software in a whole new way and the parenthesis
"dissolve" into the background. It's almost a kind of a "magic-eye" sort
of
thing, IYSWIM. Good luck, hope you eventually "get it"

Indentation is your friend.

Actually, this is related to an aviation topic: CRM. Why do some pilots
highlight their route on a chart? Because this makes it far easier for the
human eye to locate the route when first looking (back at) the chart.
Absent this, various forms of mental processing are required. This takes
time and effort.

In programming, we've the same opportunity to do things in a way that
reduces the need to "think" over trivia. Indentation is one good example.
Whether you're programming in a C derivative (in which case you must match
braces), a LIST derivative (parens), a language with BEGINs and ENDs, or
anything else, doing this "matching" involves work. Proper indentation
makes this much easier, as a lexical block is made visually "obvious".

It's the equivilent of highlighting the route.

Most modern editors will indent automatically, and even using colors or
graphical markers to further enhance the display of the code. Using one of
these is like shifting to the use of a moving map GPS.

- Andrew

On Thu, 07 Aug 2003 12:53:25 GMT,
(leslie) wrote:

: Be careful, the only thing worse than the high wing-low wing debate is the
: vi-emacs debate.

MacWrite forever, man! Peace!

Rob

On Wed, 06 Aug 2003 22:05:32 -0400, L Smith
wrote:

Roger Long wrote:

Got it! Damn parentheses. What a difference a ( ) makes.

I forget those every once in a while. :-)), at least in spreadsheets.



For me, one of the biggest pains in programming, and the cause of more
bugs and

There is so much math required to become a programmer, I'd think that
using parentheses would become second nature. Prefix, postfix, and
infix.

other problems than anything else, is trying to get my parentheses in
the right places.

You should try writing a compiler :-))

I've recently had the "opportunity" to work with the Scheme programming
language.

I've not heard of that, but I've been out of the business for over 5
years now.

What's one of the key structural elements of its syntax? Parentheses!

Parenthesis is pretty important in most programming languages and in
virtually all math that is done within the programs. It sets the
order in which operations are performed. True the operators such as
+, -, /, *, and ^ have their own precedence, but in the end they all
bow to the parenthesis.

In school we had a few exercises where we had to perform the same math
using prefix, postfix, and infix. Now that got *really* confusing. I
don't think I could do all of them now. Actually that's not true. I
know I couldn't do all of them now. :-))
Post fix is, I believe the same as RPN and I've never successfully
managed to use a calculator that used RPN.


Talk about a user-unfriendly language.

Try straight C using pointers and dynamic memory allocation. They
call it a write only language for a reason. :-)) Straight C lets you
do virtually anything with almost no type checking. You can add an
integer to an address, to a pointer, to a piece of text and it won't
complain. More recent compilers let you turn on type checking, or
more correctly they are set up for ANSI C and will allow you to turn
the type checking off if you wish.

Still...Write something in straight C without internal documentation
and then go back six months later and try to follow what you wrote.

It's a relatively elegant language that lets you write very compact
code, unlike the visual counterparts which are very easy to use, but
generate "bloat code".

Roger Halstead (K8RI EN73 & ARRL Life Member)
www.rogerhalstead.com
N833R World's oldest Debonair? (S# CD-2)


Rich Lemert

On Thu, 7 Aug 2003 02:06:11 +0000 (UTC), (Paul
Tomblin) wrote:

In a previous article, L Smith said:
For me, one of the biggest pains in programming, and the cause of more
bugs and
other problems than anything else, is trying to get my parentheses in
the right places.

If you use a modern user friendly editor like "vi", you can just hit "%"
and it will take you to the matching paren, so you can see if they match
up correctly.

Actually any recent incarnation of Excel does that without having to
ask. You just have to watch what it's telling you.

Roger Halstead (K8RI EN73 & ARRL Life Member)
www.rogerhalstead.com
N833R World's oldest Debonair? (S# CD-2)

On Thu, 7 Aug 2003 08:03:45 -0400, Drew Hamilton wrote:

Paul Tomblin wrote:
If you use a modern user friendly editor like "vi", you can just hit "%"
and it will take you to the matching paren, so you can see if they match
up correctly.

Be careful, the only thing worse than the high wing-low wing debate is the
vi-emacs debate.

Not to me...I don't like either one of them.:-)) and haven't had to
be concerned with them for over 5 years..er 6 years. I retired during
Osh, at Osh in 97...Took my last week of work on vacation...and they
still owed me for something like 90 days of vacation(give or take a
couple)

We weren't allowed to carry over more than 10 days from one year to
the next, but they made exceptions for those of us who lived with the
computers. I only had one day off in my first two years back after
college. All those years after I went back to work I carried a pager
even on vacation. They even had me paged over the PA system at
Oshkosh one year.

Roger Halstead (K8RI EN73 & ARRL Life Member)
www.rogerhalstead.com
N833R World's oldest Debonair? (S# CD-2)

- awh

(vi forever!)

On Thu, 07 Aug 2003 23:15:45 -0000,
(journeyman) wrote:

On Thu, 07 Aug 2003 20:33:53 GMT, Roger Halstead
wrote:

other problems than anything else, is trying to get my parentheses in
the right places.

You should try writing a compiler :-))

I have. It's really not that complicated. Just a bunch of basic data
structures.


I've recently had the "opportunity" to work with the Scheme programming
language.

I've not heard of that, but I've been out of the business for over 5
years now.

Lisp dialect. Lots of Irritating Spurious Parentheses. Been around
much longer than 5 years.


Post fix is, I believe the same as RPN and I've never successfully
managed to use a calculator that used RPN.

I remember doing planning for a solo cross-country, using my HP
calculator to crunch the numbers for W&B. My instructor's eyes glazed
over.


Talk about a user-unfriendly language.

Try straight C using pointers and dynamic memory allocation. They
call it a write only language for a reason. :-)) Straight C lets you

C is a friendly language. It's just picky about whom it calls its
friends.

It's Powerful, elegant, and relatively simple in its structure. It's
relatively easy for one who has studied it to write some very powerful
programs, but without thorough documentation I don't think I'd ever
call it friendly. :-))

I've seen code that students turned in where it took more work to
decipher than it did to write it. Course I saw a few students who
could write Pascal that way too and it's almost a plain language when
it comes to source code.

Roger Halstead (K8RI EN73 & ARRL Life Member)
www.rogerhalstead.com
N833R World's oldest Debonair? (S# CD-2)

Morris

Roger Halstead wrote:

I've seen code that students turned in where it took more work to
decipher than it did to write it. Course I saw a few students who
could write Pascal that way too and it's almost a plain language when
it comes to source code.

Please help.

You've the perfect opportunity to teach that code is almost universally read
more than it is written. More, the reader is typically unfamiliar with the
code being read - even if it's the author, but a few days or weeks or
months or years downstream.

This should motivate the writing of code designed not to be written quickly,
but read easily. Avoiding nested returns, keeping logic expressions
simple, commenting, writing short functions...

I taught in a "new hire" program for a number of years at a couple of
investment banks in NYC a while back. Too may (most?) of the people hired
regarded the concept of writing code to be written as foreign.

- Andrew