Re: OT - Programming Languages w/o English Syntax
On Fri, 2003-10-17 at 19:54, Chris Roddy wrote:
> Don Werve wrote:
>
> >Actually, English grammar is a nightmare to behold; there is no
> >consistent method of handling verb conjugations, and the structure of a
> >sentence is integral to its meaning; you can't just randomly move words
> >around in an English sentence and expect things to work. The way a
> >computer works at the low level (e.g., assembler and/or machine code) is
> >actually much more similar to Japanese, where you have an action and the
> >associate data stapled together in pairs, much like Japanese words are
> >(nominally) paired with particles.
> >
> >The only reason that English-esque languages are prevalent is that, in
> >the early days, most of the programmers were native English speakers,
> >and as such, wrote tools and compilers that best fit their native
> >linguistic models. If computerdom had started in Germany, then I'd
> >wager that we'd see more languages which used a German grammatic style.
> >
> >
> really, the syntax of most programming languages is not very much like
> english -- english would have us putting the block before the for() or
> if() :-) ...
What???? (At least for control structures and procedural languages.)
IF (I LIKE BEER) AND (THERE IS BEER IN THE FRIDGE) THEN
GO GET A "BUD"
END IF
IF (THE FOOTBALL GAME IS ON TV) THEN
TURN ON TV TO ESPN
IF (BEER IN HAND) THEN
WHILE (BOTTLE NOT FULL)
DRINK BEER
END WHILE
SCREAM AT OLD LADY FOR MORE BEER
END IF
END IF
No, there's not a perfect correlation, and it looks more like
COBOL than stack-oriented languages like C/Pascal (not RPN stacks!),
but the same control flow is still there
--
-----------------------------------------------------------------
Ron Johnson, Jr. ron.l.johnson@cox.net
Jefferson, LA USA
"Our computers and their computers are the same color. The
conversion should be no problem!"
Unknown
Reply to: