Re: Spoken programming language

I don't think that you quite understand me. I meant that I wanted to
make a human language based on programming syntax not the word variety.

Sent from my iPod

On Jan 2, 2009, at 10:49 PM, Christopher Wright <dhasenan@...>
wrote:

> 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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