[
Lists Home |
Date Index |
Thread Index
]
At 10:11 PM 1/11/2002 -0500, John Cowan wrote:
>Mike Champion scripsit:
>
> > Is it REALLY going to be easier for inhabitants of
> > the Real World to develop useful declarative schemas
> > than useful procedural code? Educate me!
>
>IMHO (and I really mean MO), the chief advantage of declarative
>code is that it's not procedural, and therefore provides a
>cross-check.
Bingo.
>Whatever passes both a ruleset and hand-tailored
>code has a good chance of being correct, because although both
>of these need to be created by programmers (roughly defined as
>people who are capable of giving rigorous directions to intelligent
>morons, i.e. computers), and therefore are subject to error,
>the *kinds* of errors that people make writing each kind of code
>tend to be very different.
A second advantage is that declarative systems - which are, after all, tied
to code - tend to allow for more reuse. If I have a way of declaring the
metric feet for a limerick, I can reuse those declarations for a sonnet or
an ode.
Jonathan
|
