Chapter 9: Notation
Perhaps of all the creations of man language is the most astonishing.
Giles Lytton Strachey, Words and Poetry
The right language can make all the difference in how easy it is to write a program. This is why a practicing programmer’s arsenal holds not only general-purpose languages like C and its relatives, but also programmable shells, scripting languages, and lots of application-specific languages.
The power of good notation reaches beyond traditional programming into specialized problem domains. Regular expressions let us write compact (if occasionally cryptic) definitions of classes of strings; HTML lets us define the layout of interactive documents, often using embedded programs in other languages such as JavaScript; PostScript ...
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