So, You Want To Write Your Own Programming Language?

[Mike James]

On Thursday, 23 January 2014 at 10:24:23 UTC, Chris wrote:
> On Wednesday, 22 January 2014 at 18:46:06 UTC, Walter Bright 
> wrote:
>> On 1/22/2014 3:40 AM, Chris wrote:
>>> Syntax is getting simplified due to the fact that the 
>>> listener "knows what we
>>> mean", e.g. "buy one get one free". I wonder to what extent 
>>> languages will be
>>> simplified one day. But this is a topic for a whole book ...
>>
>> There was this article recently:
>>
>> http://www.onthemedia.org/story/yesterday-internet-solved-20-year-old-mystery/
>>
>> about how english is so redundant one can write sentences 
>> using just the first letter of each word, and it is actually 
>> understandable.
>
> These examples are more about context than redundancy in the 
> grammar. This is very interesting, because the burden is more 
> and more on the listener and less on the speaker. The speaker 
> can omit things relying on the listener's common sense or 
> knowledge of the world (or "you know what I mean" skills). In 
> the beginning, languages were quite complicated (8 or more 
> cases, inflections), but over the centuries things have been 
> simplified, probably due to the fact that humans are 
> experienced enough and can now trust the "interpreter" in the 
> listener's head.
> A good example are headlines. A classic is "Driver refused 
> license". Now, everybody will assume that it was not the driver 
> who refused the license (default assumption or the _unmarked 
> case_). If it were in fact the driver who refused the license, 
> the headline would have been different, some sort of linguistic 
> flag would have been raised. This goes into the realms of 
> pragmatics, a very interesting discipline. Some of the concepts 
> found in natural languages can also be found in programming 
> languages. I find it extremely interesting how the human mind 
> (not just language) is reflected in programming languages.

Headlines are a good source. My favourites are from WW2...

MacArthur flies back to front.

British push bottles up Germans.

-<mike>-