Thou shalt have no other gods before the ANSI C standard 1533

Trevor L. Jackson, III

One of the reasons for that is economy of notation. Mathematic is rife with this, even using distinct alphabets (e.g., Greek), diacritical marks (average, sup, inf, prime), fonts, and even font attributes (bold, italic) to condense the notation. *Economy of notation leads to economy of thought*.

Just one word: APL

Ok, ok, just a few more. Anybody reading an APL program can say, brthppput to that. I can't imagine any more concise and shorter (economic) notation .. nor, come to thing of it, more terse. But economy of thought !?

I still can't understand the two-line APL program that verified a chess move (except castling). Yes!! TWO LINES. When the author was asked about it, he said, "I could have written it in one line, but then, nobody would have understood it". Gerard S.

Can you imagine a programming language (whose main purpose is to communicate with humans rather than machines) where all of those aspects of the notation meant something? No one could ever write the debugger! ;-) Historically dense notation is incredibly important. Try reading Euclid's original descriptions. They are ludicrously ponderous when compared to the economy of modern notation. Now we teach plane geometry in 7th grade. And the advantage of Arabic numerals over Roman numerals is also an obvious form of superior expression and thus cogitation. So even if C fades as an implementation language in favor of C++ or D, or C-cedilla (yes I am excluding C#), we should still expect to be using it to express concepts decades and perhaps centuries from now.