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New Fortress Specification
I was just doing a search for the Fortress language specification that Sun's working on, and found that they released a new version of the specification (version 0.707) a couple of days ago.
I haven't read over it in much detail, but I've noticed that they made some changes to their interesting "do what I mean" unit manipulation fixups. For example, one of their samples that I questioned before now reads:
Of course, parsing this the way they intend breaks a lot of normal mathematical precedence rules, and violates the recommendations of the SI. I'd sure like for them to list the rules that they use to "do what I mean" and perform "context-sensitive disambiguation." In my opinion, such things are equivalent to reading minds. And can "in" also mean "inches"? What's "3 in in in?" Or "1 foot^2 in in in?" Or, equivalently, "144 in in in in in"? Hmmm... It's still my bet that the final language will have to follow normal precedence rules more closely, because these "fixups" tend to paint you into an indefensible, surprising, and ugly corner, and they punish those who understand and write normal mathematical notation perfectly in favor of the dumber people who might make mistakes. I've taken the tactic of "err on the side of being pedantic, and try to teach correct, unambiguous usage" in my Frink language. As an example, a friend just pointed me to the following scary differences in the Google calculator, which gives results not even having the same dimensions:
Try these. Gah! Also see the Frink FAQ about this issue. By Alan Eliasen at 2005-08-01 07:15 | LtU Forum | previous forum topic | next forum topic | other blogs | 9945 reads
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