Archive for February, 2007
Wednesday, February 28th, 2007
Continuation of previous post...
1) No inner classes: no classes as static members, no classes as instance members, no local classes, no anonymous classes. The advantages of these constructs are:
Documents that the class is used only by its enclosing class.
Allows access to enclosing members in certain cases.
More convenient than writing the ...
Posted in Learn Programming | No Comments »
Sunday, February 25th, 2007
In previous posts, I introduced the idea of an alternative syntax for Java designed for educational purposes, which I'm calling PygeonJava. The design is still in progress, but here are some tentative ideas, most of them attempts at reducing learner confusion about the resolving of named things (i.e. identifying what ...
Posted in Learn Programming | No Comments »
Wednesday, February 21st, 2007
The need for an educational alternative syntax for Java is less compelling than for C, assuming, at least, that Java is not the first language learners are being exposed to. Not to say that Java is particularly easy---it's gotten rather baroque rules, in particular, surrounding inheritance, access, and generics---but it's ...
Posted in Learn Programming | No Comments »
Sunday, February 18th, 2007
Here's the first of a series of posts I'll write about interfaces.
The use of icons in GUI's is usually a misapplication of the truism that, 'simply having users point at the very thing they want is the simplest and most intuitive kind of selection'. The problems are that:
Pictographs do not ...
Posted in Interfaces, Tech | 1 Comment »
Sunday, February 11th, 2007
I considered many candidates for function declaration syntax. Imagine we want to declare a function named 'foo' that returns int and has three parameters, x, y, and z. Here are some of the candidates I considered:
func foo:int x:int y:short z:char
func foo:int params x:int ...
Posted in Learn Programming | 1 Comment »
Tuesday, February 6th, 2007
First off, I've made a couple more decisions about Pygeon syntax:
The assignment operator is the keyword a (standing for 'assign'), not the symbol = . So an assignment looks like (a foo 3) // assign 3 to variable 'foo' . The = symbol in math is not actually an operator, ...
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