Teaching

[Iavor Diatchki]

Hello,

On 11/30/06, Philippa Cowderoy <flippa at flippac.org> wrote:
> On Wed, 29 Nov 2006, Ashley Yakeley wrote:
>
> > That something might confuse the beginning user should count for nothing if it
> > does not annoy the more experienced user.
> >
>
> This experienced user regularly uses a haskell interpreter for a desk
> calculator, not to mention for producing readable budgets that show all
> the working. Removing defaulting would make that extremely tedious.

I do what you suggest all the time (I mean using Hugs as a calculator)
and I agree that it would be annoying without some sort of defaulting.
 However, I am not sure that this particular use justifies the
addition of defaulting to the _language_.  For example, it is possible
that defaulting is implemented as a switch to the command-line
interpreter.

By the way, I agree with Ashley that the "it is hard to teach"
argument is over-used.

-Iavor