That's almost certainly because you've been listening to, speaking,
reading and writing English since you were a small child, and the syntax
and grammar of English is buried deep in your brain.
Yes. But I've been programming long enough that I seem to get similar
results in most languages pretty quickly.
And you certainly do think about nouns and verbs, you just don't
*consciously* think about them.
Well, yes. But it's conscious think time that's the limiting resource
for the most part -- so if I can avoid things that require conscious
thought, that frees up more for thinking about the problem.
you will probably recognise "bloog" as the verb and "mobblet" as the
noun, even though you've almost certainly never seen those words before
and have no idea what they mean. But if I write this:
"Susan is mobblet the blooged."
you'll probably give a double-take. The words don't look right for
English grammar and syntax.
Well, actually, at that point I just assume you missed the capital
m on what is apparently a proper noun.
I've been reading, writing and thinking in Python for well over a decade.
The syntax and grammar is almost entirely invisible to me too. No
surprise there -- they are relatively close to that of the human
languages I'm used to (English). But if I were a native Chinese or Arabic
speaker, I'd probably find Python much less "natural" and *would* need to
explicitly think about the syntax more.
That's a fascinating question. I don't think that would be the case, though.
Or at least. If you've used more than a couple of programming languages that
much, I wouldn't expect it to be the case. I'm not a native speaker of
Chinese, but after a year in China, I stopped perceiving grammar and just
heard sentences. (Sadly, I've mostly since lost the vocabulary, leaving
me with the annoyance of a language I can think in grammatically but can't
express much of anything in.)
Exactly. Things are highlighted because of *what* they are, not because
of the syntax they use or because of the grammatical role they play.
Hmm, interesting point. e.g., a function name is likely to be highlighted
the same whether I'm calling it or referring to it as an object. (I'm
very new to Python, so I'm not 100% sure functions are a kind of an object,
but I seem to recall they were.)
I guess that's a point; "syntax coloring" is perhaps not the right word
either for what they do.
In a Python expression like:
an editor might colour "None" green because it's a known keyword, but
"none" black because it's a variable. If you change the syntax:
y = None if [none][0] is None else {None: none}[None]
the colours remain the same. None is coloured green not because of
*where* it is in the syntax tree, but because of *what* it is. Calling
this "syntax highlighting" is misleading, or at least incomplete.
This strikes me as correct. But it's not exactly semantics, either.
It's... I dunno what to call it.
In some languages, built-in functions truly are special, e.g. they are
reserved words. That's not the case for Python. Nevertheless, the editors
I've used treat built-ins as "pseudo-reserved words" and colourise them.
Interesting. I wonder why. I guess just because if you meant to name
a variable with one of those words, maybe you'd want the reminder.
Well that surely depends on the colour scheme you have.
Only partially. The big thing, I think, is that punctuation is separate
things next to words, not attributes of words. Come to think of it,
that may be why I sometimes like to see keywords and other times punctuation.
I like {} better than do/end, for the same reason I prefer parentheticals
in English to something like:
And this is a digression contrived end digression example.
I much prefer:
And this is a (contrived) example.
To my eyes, the feature of syntax highlighting that alone makes it
worthwhile, its killer feature, is that I can set comments and docstrings
to grey. When I'm scanning code, being able to slide my eyes over greyed-
out comments and docstrings and ignore them with essentially zero effort
is a huge help. That's the thing I most miss, more than anything else,
when using a dumb editor.
That makes some sense. In sh/python/Ruby/lua, I don't have any troubles
with it because the comment mechanism is fairly unambiguous. I'm fine in
C as long as people remember the * on the left hand side of long comments.
Omit that, and I get fussy.
Just because nobody has done it yet doesn't mean that some sufficiently
intelligent software in the future couldn't do it
True.
It raises a curious question. Imagine that you had the option of having
color highlighting to show precedence and/or grouping in complicated
expressions. Would that be better or worse than parentheses?
For instance, consider the classic:
x + y * z
In many programming languages, this is equivalent to:
x + (y * z)
But would it be clearer to just have the unpunctuated text, with the "y * z"
in, say, a slightly lighter or darker shade? I don't *think* so, but I'm
honestly not totally sure.
-s
