Being the average sophmore high school student, I am taking a course in Algebra II (okay, I want to brag somewhat, Algebra II Honors). Anyway, my mom is a high school math teacher and she often talks to me about how her math department doesn't care about proper notation. However, she finds that notation is a very important aspect of math. And I tend to agree. Just recently I noticed my teacher with some notation problems during her lectures having to do with disjuctions and solving equations.

Anyway, where's the programming part? I feel that part of my feeling of the importance of math notation has to do with the fact that I program (somewhat), in addition to the fact that my mom promotes it a lot . :-) In programming it is very important to have correct notation (if that is the word to used) or coding. The code must be exact with few variations allowed in each piece of code if you want to accomplish the same thing, the same way. For example, when using functions (built in or your own), sometimes you have the option of using parens or not, but very little varies in pieces of code in that way. Other examples are variable names and spaces between parameters, operators, etc. But ultimately, the code needs to be in a certain way to achieve your goal properly.

Has anyone else experienced something like this? Do you disagree with me on my analysis? Please respond!!

Zenon Zabinski | zdog | zdog7@hotmail.com

Update: A little clarification of my point: in programming certain things *need* to be done a certain way, and I find that that mentality transfers over for me to math, where I find that certain things also need to be done a certain way, but people often don't, and that is what I am writing about...