 Meijer: On The (Non) Value of Programming Language Research
started 11/28/2003; 3:54:37 AM - last post 12/2/2003; 1:55:26 AM
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Ehud Lamm - Meijer: On The (Non) Value of Programming Language Research 
11/28/2003; 3:54:37 AM (reads: 11438, responses: 1)
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| Meijer: On The (Non) Value of Programming Language Research |
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the real moral of the story is that natural language isn't really the best formalism for specifying language semantics. If in addition to the English prose, the Java and C# language specifications would have had formal static and operation semantics, I could have studied those to see what is really going on. It would also help we could stick to standard terminology, i.e. why use 'variable' when there's already a perfect term for that concept namely 'lvalue'.
Hear, hear!
Posted to general by Ehud Lamm on 11/28/03; 3:55:17 AM
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Mike Bibby - Re: Meijer: On The (Non) Value of Programming Language Research
12/2/2003; 1:55:26 AM (reads: 189, responses: 0)
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The Java Language Specifications seem fairly ambiguous on that, at one stage referring to variables as "C-type lvalues", but at another implying that the variable is what is EVALUATED from the right hand side of = . (Non-arrays.)
See my comments on Erik's blog for the actual quotes...
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