Re: LOGO-L> Language vs Visual

["James E. Hoburg" <james.e.hoburg@lucent.com>]

Brian Harvey writes:
> Quick!  Which character is a lower case letter?  Which ASCII code
> is a lower case letter?
> 
> And those three particular ASCII codes are relatively easy to
> examine, since they differ only in two of the eight bits.

  One of my first programming mentors was incredibly adept at reading dumps
from CDC Cyber machines--a necessity in the absence of any FORTRAN debugger.
What was truly amazing was his ability to actually de-compile the dump back
into FORTRAN source on-the-fly as he read through the dump.  I sat through
many such monologues as he fluently "read" aloud and debugged from huge
fanfold listings.

  My original line of questioning was about the intrinsic learning curve (and
communications efficiency) across various representations.  What is the effort
to literacy, to fluency?  As demonstration, "t".. vs. "0111 0100"... says
little when greater familiarity with one representation is a given.  You might
just as well show "cat", "cow", and "cicada" with their Chinese equivalents as
a self-evident demonstration of written English's superiority to written
Chinese.

  What I'd been asking here is whether assertions about a given
representation's human utility mean much without some *measure*?

Regards,
jeh
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