Re: OT - Programming Languages w/o English Syntax
On Fri, Oct 17, 2003 at 03:37:33PM -0700, Erik Steffl wrote:
>
> english has a fairly simple a regular grammar so it's fairly easy to
> create english based programming language - the basic control structures
> are pretty much english sentences.
>
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.
--
Don Werve <donw@examen.com> (Unix System Administrator)
Yorn desh born, der ritt de gitt der gue,
Orn desh, dee born desh, de umn bork! bork! bork!
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