Re: Hacker Language (was Re: Language comparison)

> You're worried about *vocabulary*?!  Surely the interesting thing will
> be the *grammar*.  It should be heavily influenced by computer
> languages: a few things that could be borrowed (off the top of my
> organiser, from a Real Soon Now conlang for GE dragons from a
> Roman-Empire-survived conworld):

[snip]

Well there are always 'pseudo-code' examples that always try to get the
point across on (for example) Slashdot (see
http://apple.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=135137&cid=11275654 though
it's more a thought process than anything).

Anyway, principles I would think of:

1. ; would be a period.

2. == might represent the copula (at least with regards to nouns).

(e.g. "john == man;" meaning "John is a man." or perhaps "john.gender ==
male" would be more representative, as in the next principle.)

3. Subobjects of course to represent possession or a quality.

(e.g. "john.smell == good;" would be John smells good.")

4. Functions are of course verbs.

(e.g. "john.walk();" for "John walks.")

5. And some sort of argument as objects.  Hard to say how to do
prepositions though.

(e.g. "john.buy(soap);" for "John buys soap.")

6a. Regexes are always handy, but I'm not sure it what context.  "And"
of course would just be some sort of list, either delimited by brackets,
and using semi-colons to end clauses, or using commas to end descriptions.

(e.g. "{ john.buy({food, water}); john.eat(peanuts); }" for "John buys
food and water and eats peanuts.")

6b. Or perhaps the shell method.

(e.g. "{john, jane}.buy({food, water})" (which of course expands to all
four possibilities you might think of) to represent "John and Jane buy
food and water.")

But these are just ideas I came up with right now.  Dunno how you'd
handle verb tense.  And of course I'm using C syntax (maybe syntax would
represent dialects?)

Pipian