[spoon-discuss] pseudocode prop

[Zarpint Jeremy Cook <mcfoufou@xxxxxxxxx>]

1. That really should have said
"semantically, but not necessarily syntactically".
I somehow mistyped that. Dave, would you mind rectifying that?

That way, which is what I intended, "Call for Inquiry" does not start a
for loop, since the "for" there is not intended, and could not reasonably
be interpreted, to be have the semantics of a for loop.

2. I think that solves the delimiter problem. I didn't put them in because
I wanted to cover the case where someone says to a public forum:

"If I have any points, I give one to Mikie the Inscrutable"

or something like that, so statements that people make all the time (which
are not pseudocode according to precedent, but would be under the prop)
wouldn't need delimiters.

Zarpint
The Style Police




On Tue, 27 Jan 2004, [iso-8859-1] Bill Adlam wrote:

>  --- 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
>
> ________________________________________________________________________
> BT Yahoo! Broadband - Free modem offer, sign up online today and save £80 http://btyahoo.yahoo.co.uk
> _______________________________________________
> spoon-discuss mailing list
> spoon-discuss@xxxxxxxxx
> http://lists.ellipsis.cx/mailman/listinfo/spoon-discuss
>

-- 
Zarpint            "All thy toiling only breeds new dreams, new dreams;
Jeremy Cook         there is no truth saving in thine own heart."
mcfoufou@xxxxxxxxx       --W.B. Yeats, The Song of the Happy Shepherd
grep -r kibo /     "Movements are the problem, not the answer to problems."
_______________________________________________
spoon-discuss mailing list
spoon-discuss@xxxxxxxxx
http://lists.ellipsis.cx/mailman/listinfo/spoon-discuss