On Thursday 08 March 2007 22:14, Ian Zimmerman wrote:
> I agree with Robert and the analogy with maths notation only reinforces
> that: when I was a student of maths, I frequently cursed the authors of
> papers I was reading for using notation without definition.  Of
> course, it was perfectly clear to someone seasoned in the area of the
> paper, because the notation was conventional - but a puzzle for a
> newbie.

When I read some of Luca Cardelli's papers on type inference I found that they 
were not explicit enough and required me to infer a lot. When that inference 
went wrong the backtracking was costly and seemed unneccesary because I could 
have read a paper 4x as long that required no inference.

But aren't we all here because we like inference and brevity?

-- 
Dr Jon D Harrop, Flying Frog Consultancy Ltd.
OCaml for Scientists
http://www.ffconsultancy.com/products/ocaml_for_scientists