New project, "Code to Code"

[Marc Lanctot]

Lennart Sorensen wrote:
> On Wed, Dec 17, 2008 at 02:30:55PM -0500, Marc Lanctot wrote:
>> Honestly, how many languages differ in the semantics and expected usage 
>> of a for loop? It's not like someone trying to learn a completely 
>> different programming paradigm would cross between paradigms (eg. 
>> imperative to functional programming) .. that's just not what the tool 
>> is meant to accomplish.
> 
> In some languages you are much better off doing a map of a function onto
> a list of data rather than looping over the data.

This would be the point of the notes below the concept's profile, to 
mention these kind of things. It depends on the application, so (IMO) 
this is for the programmer to decide not the reference tool provider.

> Doing switch statements in perl simply isn't going to happen, while some
> other languages has such a concept.

Again, people can learn from this by a note existing at the bottom of a 
"switch statement" profile. Note1: "switch statements don't exist in 
Perl, therefore you have to use if/elsif/else" and the target language 
portion would have an example in this case.

>> And, even if someone would do something like this, there should be user 
>> contributed notes attached to each translation.. following my example 
>> "Note: In LISP a better way to do a for loop is to do <<insert crazy 
>> recursive functional construct>>".
> 
> That's why I think in many cases even considering doing something a
> certain way is just plain wrong for a given language.

The reason I disagree is that there are far more concept overlaps 
between language that concepts that don't overlap. And for those that 
don't overlap nicely, the notes would solve this problem.

Marc

-- 
What a season to be beautiful without a reason.
   -- The White Stripes
--
The Toronto Linux Users Group.      Meetings: http://gtalug.org/
TLUG requests: Linux topics, No HTML, wrap text below 80 columns
How to UNSUBSCRIBE: http://gtalug.org/wiki/Mailing_lists