Every now and then, some students ask me about the reason why their programs (e.g. R) cannot be executed and errors show up one after another.
They’ll be angry just because R doesn’t know how to compute 9x if x=2 (of course 9x equals to 18), R doesn’t understand inequations like a<x<b, and an error will occur in R when they use conditions like if (x=a), etc.
Indeed they are frustrated. They cannot imagine that these clever computers cannot understand so simple words. They are amazed, somehow.
However, there ARE differences between languages of human beings and computers, which is unavoidable. When we are learning a computer language, I think the teacher should emphasize this point.
Consequently, there are rules to guide us. Usually we call these “rules” SYNTAX. When you understand the syntax of a computer language, you’d get to know why errors occur: 9x doesn’t mean 9*x; a<x<b doesn’t stands for a<x & x<b; in if (x=a), the expression “x=a” won’t generate a boolean value (but here “(x=a)” might return a boolean value using R, you may consider about the reason yourself).
There are too many cases to show the misunderstandings toward computer languages. The other day, two classmates of mine asked me whether **R **can draw a plot for Pareto distribution. For me, this is an interesting question, because when they raise this question, I’m clear that they still don’t understand a general principle: how does a program draw a plot? If they do, their problem would be just an apple pie because they’ve already know the pdf/cdf of Pareto distribution. Apparently what they want is just type a command (such as “plot pareto(a)”), then the program will generate a graph for them.
I don’t want write too much on this specified problem. In my opinion, there are some basic facts that we should know clearly about; for example:
Your program will never generate a real continuous object (variable, graph, etc) even though it seems to be continuous. Therefore you may only generate a discrete sequence like seq(1, 10, 0.01), but to generate a continuous variable x on the interval [1, 10] is impossible.
Appendix:
> x=2
> 9x
Error: syntax error in "9x"
> 1<x<3
Error: syntax error in "1<x<"
> if(x=2){print("hello")}
Error: syntax error in "if(x="
> 9*x
[1] 18
> 1<x & x<3
[1] TRUE
> if(x==2){print("hello")}
[1] "hello"
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