[under construction, and arithmetic needs re-checking]
The X3J3 committee (ca. late 1980's) did not accept my suggestions for improving the FORTRAN programming language that had seen several years developments since I first learned to read it upside down ca. 1969, by watching the efforts of a college sophomore (I was a freshman) in the study lounge at UCSD Muir College - I was a mathematician, and this advanced adding-machine code looked formalized enough to read as-is, or as-was, ... later I learned that FORTRAN read right-side-up was no easier (I would directly turn the printout upside down to debug it).
I did notice however that from a mathematician's perspective this program language was highly IBM-blematic: It required a secretarial degree just to get it to do the basics - and the more curious the requirements, the more curious the results: DO10K=1,9 wasn't a two-valued result from a proven theorem. And FORMAT's last theorem was even stranger than the first: It was a another programming language all in itself - and it was not really ForTran specific at that: FORMAT was just as common(ized) among computers with AlgoL and ForTran - yet they hadn't common-ized the main programming languages themselves, though they were very similar, being mathematical - but except for IBM's PL-1, noone tried to reconcile these ... but mathematicians have no qualms about this: Why should not computer programmers standardize early ... in fact more recently, the HTML, hyper-text mark-up language, has retaken the same FORMAT commonality, while the basic programming dialects remain incompatibly varied - and even more recently, javascript, which is almost like ActiveX but incompatible, so extends HTML, that it could be included in the definition - statements like A HREF=[URL] equate to A onClick=location=[URL].
The mathematician presses to find the fundamental rules of the universe, of numbers, and might reasonably expect the computer theorist to do the same - these days computer sciences have replaced the earlier information sciences - were it not for the open market place (which is a difficult place to think deeply, study, or converse intelligently) we might have a truely scientific computation language ... and this is my premise ... I shall use this page to present some of the ideas I've come across for generalized scientific computation linguistics, fairly similar to mathematics - for which I do have suggestion as well - and extensible from the basic programming languages ... I'd have had these improvements a quarter century ago, because I needed them to program rapidly: the lack of these usually resulted in long hours of re-reading which afforded no insight into the nature of computers and computing, but indicated the 'kluge-iness' many market trainees assume when given any new technology. As the higher technology needs a consistency not caused by 'we-put-the-wall-here' expediencies but by the ever receding limits of the sciences, we shall reconsider here what ForTran'92 should (have been) according to the higher criticism of mathematics.
I like the english-ness of mathematics: I expect to use, k=1,2,3 , as a way to specify three values of the variable 'k' - albeit it, temporally sequentially equal - in fact i,j,k=1 should mean all three variables 'i,j,k' are given the value '1' .
I set punctuation apart from the arithmetic - I'd prefer to do this in plain English , too ... especially in a computer-related field , as close-punctuation subordinates to the words themselves, rather than to the sentential phrase.
I'd like to say, Let g : g x = 2x , define the [function] 'g' , where 'g' on/at some 'x' takes the value x-squared ... notice that no parentheses are needed here: this is more the mathematics of terse, minimal talk. This could be shorter as, Let g x = 2x , but then, g y , is another [function] related conceptually more than variable-substitutably to g x ... we do this sort of distinguishing in mathematics all the time, especially with generalized operators such as the differential d y / d x .
I also like very much spacing letters into mathematical sentences, rather than packing them together like pseudo words: ln x , is not, l n x ... so that DO10K=1,9 is distinct from DO 10 K=1,9 .
[under construction]
A premise discovery under the title,