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

chris glur scripsit:

> Yes, ease of parsing too was more important then. IMO it's irrelevant
> today. OTOH I was amazed how long a linux [C] pakage takes to compile.
> The bloke who tried Oberon [the Pascal descendant] for the first time,
> said he though the compiler was broken, because it just returned --
> finished the job < 1sec.

There are C compilers that are that quick, notably the Plan 9 compiler.

> >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).
> 
> ! This amazes and disturbs me ! OTOH, let's not confuse short
> term [30 years] populatity with technical excellence.

As I posted earlier, I very much doubt that the grammar has anything at
all to do with that.

> * work left to right, top to bottom:
>   '7 -> counter' is better than counter := 7

What about those of us who read from right to left?

> 'people convinced' or the SCIENTISTS who researched and designed it ?

I'm not even a scientist, never mind a SCIENTIST.

> Finding the reason for its purported failure could make some PhDs ?

Unfortunately no.

-- 
John Cowan              [email protected]          http://www.ccil.org/~cowan
Historians aren't constantly confronted with people who carry on
self-confidently about the rule against adultery in the sixth amendment to
the Declamation of Independence, as written by Benjamin Hamilton. Computer
scientists aren't always having to correct people who make bold assertions
about the value of Objectivist Programming, as examplified in the HCNL
entities stored in Relaxational Databases.  --Mark Liberman