Re: [stack] Advantages of cat, joy ..?

Joe Bowbeer wrote:
> Don Groves wrote:
> > Once used to this way of actually forgetting about all the
> > syntax crap, it becomes just as readable, and far more
> > succinct than any Pascal-like language.
> Can the same be said of shorthand w.r.t. natural language?  (
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shorthand)

I'm not sure.

> In practice, I think a lot of the extra surface area (redundancy,
> delimiters, grammatical rules) that is built into popular programming
> languages (as well as natural writing systems), is there to serve the human
> mind.

That's unlikely. Yes, some of those features were deliberately chosen;
but most of them were 'chosen' for other reasons than "because it's
efficient for humans". Ease of parsing drove Pascal's design; it's now
clear that Pascal's strength is its simplicity, not its particular
choice of parsers.

Lojban is a constructed language that was designed "entirely" from
scratch in order to be easily learned and unambiguous. One of the design
choices was to make it easily parsed, and the implementor chose to make
the language defined by an LL grammar. The result has been catastrophic:
in spite of a reasonably strong community, not one person has EVER
achieved fluency in lojban (according to the community-acclaimed best
speaker).

Actual human languages are parseable by a structure known as a
"unification grammar" (to one extent or another), but defining a
unification grammar takes a LOT of work, and is immensely slow to parse
(currently). In addition, the linguistic features of unification
grammars lend themselves poorly to directing machines -- for example,
ambiguity and multiple meanings are inherent.

> Joe

-Wm