[pm215]

I suspect Dijkstra would have disagreed with you about "and" and "or", judging from his criticism of the technical report which had the line "even the standard symbols used for logical connectives have been avoided for the sake of clarity".

Personally I think one advantage of '&&' and '||' is that it's clear they're a notation that you need to know the syntax and semantics of. For instance typically '&&' is "short-circuiting" and will not evaluate its RHS if the LHS is true; a natural-language "if a and b then ..." doesn't suggest that critical detail or necessarily nudge you to go and check. (Not that Dijkstra was in favour of short-circuiting logical operators, to judge by https://www.cs.utexas.edu/~EWD/transcriptions/EWD10xx/EWD100... point 4...)

More generally, I'm not sure of the benefit of tailoring the language syntax for beginners rather than experienced practitioners; the advantage of '&&', '||' and the rest of the "C-like" syntax stuff in a new language is that it's familiar to a wide base of existing experienced programmers.

[cubefox]

We could have "and" and "cand" (conditional and, his terminology), which would be more explanatory. Or we use "and" (conditional) and "ncand" (non-conditional and). Depending on which should be the default.

> More generally, I'm not sure of the benefit of tailoring the language syntax for beginners rather than experienced practitioners; the advantage of '&&', '||' and the rest of the "C-like" syntax stuff in a new language is that it's familiar to a wide base of existing experienced programmers.

At one point in time every awkward and outdated syntax was the more familiar option, but that's of course not a good argument not to improve it, otherwise we would be stuck with it forever.