Re: User Design Issues, principle, and the whole philosophy (who is y our customer, anyway?

[Dave Glowacki <dg...@ssec.wisc.edu>]

Jon Stevens wrote:
> on 9/1/2000 11:41 AM, "Dickerson, Monty W." <Mo...@viatel.com>
> wrote:
> 
> > If your users are "wimps" who can't deal with { and } and prefer english
> > #begin and #end, then should you turn them in to programming geeks?  Or
> > cater to a more natural way of expressing things.
> > 
> > Thank God our graphic designers don't think like us!  Cuz if they did,
> > all the web would look like *our* sites!?!
> 
> My point is that 6 months ago (or whenever #begin/#end was added) users
> didn't even have the concept of those tags and really didn't complain about
> using { and }. They would only complain about it now that they have seen
> them, not because they are "wimps" and don't understand {}. What they did
> complain about was that {} broke their javascript parsing.
> 
> People who write in English understand the concept of using the "(" and ")"
> characters to enclose something. Because of that, changing that to be "{"
> and "}" to enclose something is not a major mind jump in my opinion.
>
> I personally think that #begin and #end are extremely ugly syntax for simply
> enclosing something. It is also 8 characters of extra typing.

I don't think the issue is number of characters or personal aesthetics, 
it's one of mnemonic value.

For people who don't know C, #begin and #end are easier to remember.
Sure, { and } aren't a major mind jump.  The problem is remembering
if it was the curly brackets or the square brackets or the
parentheses or the angle brackets.

Would it greatly complicate the parser to have this alternative?
If not, why is there such resistance to this?