[spoon-discuss] Calls for(;;){} Enquiry

[Bill Adlam <sagitta_elegans@xxxxxxxxx>]

 --- Zarpint Jeremy Cook <mcfoufou@xxxxxxxxx> wrote: > 
> Thanks for your comments. Question:
> Why would "I submit a CFI' be *crackle* pseudocode, or not terminate
> even if it was?
> And if something doesn't terminate, the *buzz* Admin interprets it so
> that it does.

Let me put that a bit more coherently.

p1767 defines Pseudocode - if it defines it at all - as
...
> code-like structures called Pseudocode under the condition that the 
> Pseudocode takes effect in a single instant and uses either features
> syntactically, but not necessarily semantically, similar to C's 'if',
> 'while', 'do while', 'for', 'break', 'goto', 'switch', 'continue', 
> functions, variables, and operators, or features of normal English.

'Similar syntactically' is rather vague, but 'for' is certainly
syntactically similar to 'for', so 'I submit a Call for Inquiry' starts
a for loop.  (Logically the LOSA ought to work like the preprocessor,
so abbreviating it to CFI would not help either.)  In general, actions
would have to avoid use of the C keywords listed.  Even then they would
still be Pseudocode of the second kind, with features of normal English
(this would not seem to cause any difficulty).

I can't think of a satsfactory way out of this without changing the
wording: you could say that it's not 'code-like', or not a 'structure',
but then it becomes a very subjective decision whether something is
Pseudocode or not.  Or you can simply say it's not 'called Pseudocode'
- but that's even worse because someone else can always call it
Pseudocode, and I've no idea what would happen then.

Even if you want to leave the precise semantics unspecified to foster
creativity, I think you should specify that text is only Pseudocode if
it's delimited and labelled as Pseudocode.

Sagitta

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