A Pleasantly Lucid Batch of Sections

In terms of all this stuff about precedence and associativity, I'm very pro-APL.  In my humble opinion, the parentheses approach actually makes expressions more readable across the board.  Uglier, perhaps.  But more readable, especially if we make the provision (a utopian one) that our programmers will be somewhat reasonable in their use of consecutive parentheses.

This chapter has a whole lot to say about the contention between those supporting increased flexibility in languages and those who would prefer to opt for better error-checking to make sure programmers don't make stupid mistakes.  I guess I'd fall into the former camp, since it's really nice to be able to do some of the things that operator overloading and type coercion allow us to do.  But I'll admit that my feelings will vary from one programming task to another, depending on how much I trust the programmers responsible and how crucial the program at hand is.  I mean, if we take Dr. Stonedahl's example of Ada being used for computing that holds human lives in the balance...  Well, yeah.  I'll take extra protection over coding flexibility any day for a case like that.

Really, I just think that if people would stop making any mistakes at all, forever, things would be much easier for everyone.

Lazy, error-prone coders...