Thanks for writing this article. I've often wondered if I could still program if I lost my eyesight; this is reassuring.
When I consider at expressions with infix notations, I visually scan then from left to right and right to left. Visually matching parenthesis is also important.
I get the impression that if one were to listen to an expression in one pass, reverse polish notation would be the most intelligible. What's your experience like here? Does it make a difference?
Infix notation is when the operators goes in the middle. For instance, the expression: x * (y-z) uses infix notation. When I look at it, I can see at a glance that x is multiplied by the difference between y and z. However, were I to listen to it, I wouldn't know when to expect the parenthesis to close. I would have to remember that I am within a parenthesis.
Postfix notation, or reverse polish notation places operators after the operands. So that same expression would read " x y z - * ". The idea is that you push x on a stack, then y, then z. Then comes the minus sign, you pop the top two elements, y and z, and push their difference on the stack. Finally you pop the two elements, x and y-z, and replace them with their product.
In reverse polish notation, you still need to remember something, the state of the stack, but there are no parenthesis. I get the impression it would easier to parse if listening to the expression, but I may be wrong.
So which parses most easily for you? x * (y-z), or x y z - * ?
When I consider at expressions with infix notations, I visually scan then from left to right and right to left. Visually matching parenthesis is also important.
I get the impression that if one were to listen to an expression in one pass, reverse polish notation would be the most intelligible. What's your experience like here? Does it make a difference?