Re: expressions vs. statements

["Seth Gordon" <address@hidden>]

   This is actually a question people on this list might
   have interesting opinions about.  Does distinguishing 
   between expressions and statements buy you anything in 
   expressive power?  I have often wondered about what
   the point of this distinction was...

Every natural human language makes some kind of grammatical
distinction between nouns and verbs.  I think programming languages
should take note of this distinction, and make a clear boundary
between forms that have side-effects (verbs) and forms that do not
(nouns).  The real reason, IMHO, that so many programmers get tripped
up by bugs like "if (a = 0) {...}" is that they have trouble
interpreting a form that is simultaneously a noun and a verb.

-- 
"Perhaps those of us who care about quality programs have not spoken up
often enough--`for bad programs to triumph requires only that good
programmers remain silent.' I call this passivity the `Silence of the
Lambdas.'" --Henry Baker
== Seth Gordon == sethg@ropine.com == http://ropine.com/ == std. disclaimer ==