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Re: Spoken programming language

From:Christopher Wright <dhasenan@...>
Date:Saturday, January 3, 2009, 3:49
Vincent Pistelli wrote:
> I was looking up the BASIC programming language, and I thought that > something like BASIC could double as a spoken language with some major > adjustments.
Yes, it could. And it does! It's called English. You're proposing a conlang that is restricted to things that your coding style would allow. That seems like a strange limitation. You could, potentially, do some interesting things with this idea. Your compiler, if it were sufficiently familiar with the grammar, could handle things like: function "do something interesting": ... function "do other stuff": ... did something interesting This (the statement "did something interesting") indicates that, sometime before this statement, function "do something interesting" has to complete. I'd be interested in seeing if programming languages could find a use for grammatical constructs relating to code structure, things that don't apply to natural languages, but I think these would be sufficiently unnatural to humans that it wouldn't be useful.

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Vincent Pistelli <pva003@...>