> Anyway, I'm trying to argue lingustics in a perl ML, with zero training.
> Is there a linguist in the house? (Hm, didn't Larry go to Japan to learn a
> language with wierd word-order?) (What's up with Larry, anyway? Any
> preliminary RFC responces?)
Everyone a linguist. :)
In any case, I think the summary on this is that Perl undoubtedly reflects
English syntaxes in many ways, and not in others. We aren't writing a
natural language, anyhow. The fact is that Perl does allow syntactic
flexibility absent from nearly all other programming languages. That
should be enough for everyone with a programming language. My point has
simply been that "readability" for non-English speakers should not be more
of a problem with Perl than any other code, and is, in fact, less so.
At the start of this thread, I mentioned Damian's Perligata. You begin
to see the method behind the madness (sorry Damian). Our conversation
isn't unique, or isolated. See Umberto Eco's "The Search for the Perfect
Language" for the same conversation, repeated by every thinking person who
lived. We aren't as clever as we'd like to think.
Well, Perligata is ...
