[ruby-talk:15315] Re: [OT-ish] language (was: Re: Discussion on new Ruby features)

>===== Original Message From David Alan Black <[e-mail]> 
=====
>On Wed, 16 May 2001, Benjamin J. Tilly wrote:
[...]
>> For those who missed it, Japanese is like German or Latin in being
>> an inflected language.  The role of a word in the sentence is
>> determined from the ending of the word, and not the position of
>> the word in the sentence.
>>
>> Thus while there may be an order that people usually use, it is
>> not required.
>
>You would sound *very* strange in German if you messed with the word
>order :-)

But understood would you be.

[...]
>I keep trying to ferret out correspondences between computer languages
>and natural languages (I don't mean at a cognitive level -- more at an
>aesthetic level), but it's all so intuitive as not to mean much.  I
>find Perl's context sensitivity to be very inflection-like, sort of
>like inflected articles that obviate prepositions (German "dem" often
>equivalent on its own to "to the", for example).

Amusing.  When this thread arose before it was started by
http://www.csse.monash.edu.au/~damian/papers/HTML/Perligata.html
and now that comes afterwards.

That paper takes the idea that context is inflexion-like and maps
it onto a subset of a well-known inflexion-based language.  The
associated module actually implements this in Perl so you can, if
you want, now write working programs in pseudo-Latin.

Perl 6 is going much farther in the direction of allowing people
to rewrite the language however they like.  Matz is watching this,
but last I heard does not plan to imitate the idea in Ruby.  (The
key reason it is being done in Perl is to allow for backwards
compatibility while fundamentally changing the language.  Matz
doesn't have a compelling desire to remove old cruft...)

Cheers,
Ben