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Symbolic vs. Mnemonic Relational Operators: Is "GT" Greater Than ">"?
theodp writes: "Mnemonic operators," writes SAS's Rick Wicklin as he weighs the pros-and-cons of Symbolic Versus Mnemonic Logical Operators, "tend to appear in older languages like FORTRAN, whereas symbolic operators are common in more recent languages like C/C++, although some relatively recent scripting languages like Perl, PHP, and Windows PowerShell also support mnemonic operators. SAS software has supported both operators in the DATA step since the very earliest days, but the SAS/IML language, which is more mathematically oriented, supports only the symbolic operators. Functionally, the operators are equivalent, so which ones you use is largely a matter of personal preference. Since consistency and standards are essential when writing computer programming, which operators should you choose?"
Stick to simple mathematical symbols for the basic comparators we've use since elementary school. Shame about the fucking mess with = and ==.
Are there any non-English languages or anyone using the language for whom English is a challenge? If there are, the use of symbols would seem to be preferred over remembering what the first letters of "plus que" are in English. (FTW.)
">" is universally understood in mathematics
"GT" relies on a knowledge of English, and what it stands for, and thus what it means.
But the bigger question - WHY does any language created nowadays have hard-coded operator names? If you prefer >, why not just use that and make it equivalent to GT in whatever default settings you provide? Why are you constrained to the choice of operators given to you and the mnemonics they choose to use?
However, arguing over it is pointless. Change if it you can, otherwise it doesn't matter. If you can change it, or overload it, or rename it, or macro-ise it as you like, than it doesn't matter either.
I guess we've met this guy. Apart from that, personally I'd like to ban the lone "=" operator so it's "==" for comparison, ":=" for assignment with all the other two char operators like != and += intact. So many languages try to be "smart" instead of just making the difference more explicit.
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It's one thing to use ">" for "less than".
That would be almost bound to cause confusion.
The comparison operators > and < have been in use for four hundred years and are (or should have been) learned in primary school. They also work in any (human) language, not just in English, and map directly to what is used in mathematics. No one should be confused by them.
That's one of the reasons I find Perl to be an undesirable language to use.
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
We could say ">", "GT" or "gt", or perhaps even "greater than."
I disagree. I believe > is easier to parse while reading code since it separates it from identifiers, control statements, constants, numbers, and other keywords. It's the same reason && is better than "AND" in C syntax derivatives.
I'd be quite pleased with a language that understood all three to be the same thing, with similar broad expression capabilities for everything else as well.
Please, no. Syntactic sugar is one thing but creating multiple equivalent ways to express the same thing is just a readability, support, and maintenance nightmare.
explicit and English-like for the newcomer.
Which is how we got COBOL. It turned out that just making source code use lots (and lots) of English words isn't enough to allow laymen to understand it or make changes, so all you end up with is a language that programmers find exhausting to read and annoying to write.
"What do you despise? By this are you truly known." --Princess Irulan, Manual of Muad'Dib
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