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000094_icon-group-sender _Thu May 13 15:34:56 1993.msg
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Received: from owl.CS.Arizona.EDU by cheltenham.cs.arizona.edu; Mon, 17 May 1993 07:43:48 MST
Received: by owl.cs.arizona.edu; Mon, 17 May 1993 07:43:47 MST
Date: 13 May 93 15:34:56 GMT
From: pipex!uknet!mucs!m1!bevan@uunet.uu.net (Stephen J Bevan)
Organization: Department of Computer Science, University of Manchester
Subject: Re: runtime debugger and the Icon fan club.
Message-Id: <BEVAN.93May13163456@panda.cs.man.ac.uk>
References: <9305110634.AA11851@internal.apple.com>
Sender: icon-group-request@cs.arizona.edu
To: icon-group@cs.arizona.edu
Status: R
Errors-To: icon-group-errors@cs.arizona.edu
In article <9305110634.AA11851@internal.apple.com> nevin@apple.com (Nevin ":-]" Liber) writes:
I disagree. At first glance, I and most other C programmers would
interpret the expression "* broof" as a dereference of the pointer broof.
Indeed, but this only goes to show that it was a design error to make
the dereferencing operator a prefix operator.
I beleive that HCI (human computer interface) folks have done studies that
show that it is easier for programmers to have semicolons as terminators
than as seperators.
References? The only study I saw used (refs long lost) used 1st year
students from a single university (Berkeley?) as the sample. Not very
representative IMHO. Are there any recent studies that compare
languages that require terminators (C) with languages that require
separators (Pascal) with languages that can adopt either approach
(Oberon-2) with languages that require no terminators or separators at
all (Eiffel)?