Re: The "spinoza" programming language

On Mar 10, 4:27 pm, "Bruce C. Baker" <b...@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
wrote:
"spinoza1111" <spinoza1...@xxxxxxxxx> wrote in message

news:a8ec76eb-9a4d-4810-a27f-4f281372fd72@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx

Ed, I don't know why, but my newsreader simply will not properly quote the
original text /in your posts only./ That's not a shot, just a statement of
fact. Therefore, I'm going to enclose your text in Lua-style brackets --[[
and --]]

--[[
In Mouse (Byte Magazine August 1979) it was something like "H", "e",
"l", "l", "o", " ", "W", "o", "r", "l", "d". Any stack-oriented
language such as Forth seems minimalistically expressive at times but
then can be hard to understand as regards long expressions. The
parenthesis is an important character which allows us to enter a room
within a castle and in that room deal with the issues of that room.
--]]

Hmm...cool brackets. Very visible. Present a gettable-aroundable
problem to scanners when, of course, the "handle" of the token --]] is
also a member of other tokens - here, subtraction.


Mouse is still around; seehttp://users.encs.concordia.ca/~grogono/Mouse/mouse.html
I'm not exactly sure what its relevance to the current discussion is,
though.

The relevance is that we can be deceived by code samples from
languages which make things seem easy.


If you really want to avoid semicolons and see what modern syntax looks
like, try Lua:

--[[
I don't see any benefit to "modern" syntax. Syntax doesn't evolve: if
anything, it shows in natural language a distinct entropy as seen,
like you know, in the language used by the 'tards in like that movie
Idiocracy.
--]]

Haven't seen "Idiocracy", so condescending cultural reference flew totally
over my head. Sorry.

Not intended to be condescending, except to the people, not including
present company, who act like the morons in the Mike Judge film.


Lua: Nice clean syntax AND provides all the modern functionality with one
(1) data structure, the table. Worth a look, Ed. Trust me.

You mean tables as in relational?


--[[
Over time, a snappy language like Cantonese gets geologically worn
down, from the viewpoint of pronunciation syntax, to Mandarin. Over
time, the French stop pronouncing "s" at the end of words primarily to
embarass me. Over time, whom is assimilated to who.
--]]

I have an actual question for you, Ed, which you, being in HK, are uniquely
capable of answering. This is not intended to trap or embarrass you, just a
simple question. No BS involved. No agenda.

Excellent.

I have heard that when books, particularly science books, are translated
from European languages into Chinese of any dialect, the translated text
becomes huge because concepts which are fairly straight-forwardly expressed
in the source text map into extended metaphors which can only be expressed
using long strings of Chinese characters. The way I heard it expressed was
"Even short computer science books balloon up to the size of phone books."

Untrue. Chinese computer books neither shorter, nor longer.

See "Aristotle in China"
http://www.amazon.com/Aristotle-China-Categories-Translation-Institute/dp/0521028477/ref=sr_1_2?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1205144204&sr=8-2.
Insofar as Western concepts expressed true invariants, they are
translatable into Chinese, not one for one but in such a way that we
can communicate.

Sure, there are differences. In teaching logic I find that "material
implication", in which "If the moon is made of green cheese then there
are unicorns" is true a scandal in Asia: but it is also a scandal to
beginning logic students in Chicago. Books on "Indian Logic" counsel
the teacher to always use an example as a representative of the
operation, such as "where there is smoke there is fire", and to de-
emphasize symbolising.

My coworkers at a compiler development firm in the mainland in fact
seemed to better understand Aho, Sethi, Lam and Ullman's COMPILERS
book than American programmers.

Take "computer". Originally, this was symbolized by Chinese characters
that sound like "com pu tah". Today "electrical brain" is used. This
is no more, and no less, distant from what a computer IS than
"computer",arguably it is closer, since word processing is not
computation whereas an electronic brain can do both mathematics and
word processing.


Q: Are there CS texts in Chinese, or do the Chinese students have to learn
English or another IE language before beginning their studies of CS and
other scientific subjects?

English is in fact a required subject for studying CS, but as an
accident.

Arguably, bit mapped displays and laser printers did more to bring
China into the modern world because all of a sudden, you can display
and print Chinese characters.

Hong Kong University, officially English speaking, has found that
when, as often happens, all the students registered for a class,
especially one in a technical field, speak Cantonese, the class is
conducted in Cantonese, in spite of official university policy.

Folk linguistics often incorporates a variant of Sapir Whorf in that
at a certain level of globalization, the folk start saying that the
language of other mobs of folk is somehow deficient on the job as a
mode of communication, or in general.

But Chomsky blew this out of the water, is my understanding, showing
that "deep structure" is wired in such that any language can say
anything.

Pidgin Chinese, known today as Chinglish, can be understood by
Westerners with no special training and can express deep thoughts.
Sure, Chinglish design in old day by Hakka boat girls and English
sailors because they want conduct business, usually boom boom jig jig,
but business about all under Heaven. Chinglish a simplification of
English: but Chinglish express all thing. Is paradox contradiction,
that programmers speaking English want the ren in other land speak
perfect English. This because perfect English follow inflection rules
which are not orthogonal and they be no good in programming language.
Ai-yah, can say all thing. No make fun.

In a good programming language, that is (to return to Received
English), we would not expect to have to add an s to verbs with a
third person singular subject. It is a rule reminiscent of past
programming languages and assembler, where (for example) you might
have to use a different jump operation depending on how far you jump.

Take "whom". To whom am I speaking. There is no structural,
mathematical reason to add the m, save that it adds redundancy in a
statistical sense by reducing, in a noisy channel, the number of well-
formed sentences.

Indeed, one of the most frequent violations world-wide is what we say
after we've knocked on someone's door, and they say "who is it?". Only
fruitcakes say, "it is I, Lord Douchebag". But in writing, it is in
fact a solecism to write "It was me who performed in the play": "It
was I who performed" is correct because "is" is symmetrical and the
word to its right is a subject.

Burchfield, the modern Fowler, describes a reverse phenomenon of
complication: in the old days we could say "everybody agrees with me,
doesn't he"? Now we have to say "don't they" with an "illogical" shift
from singular to plural. Boo hoo. Once you understand it, it's logical
(and could be coded in a natural language parser of sufficient power).

But "it is I, a total fruitcake" makes NO SENSE to the educated native
English speaker (as opposed to the writer) who has learned that in
declarative sentences in the active voice, the object follows the
verb, and that pronouns, for some unexplainable reason, change when
they become objects.

Imagine having to spell a variable differently depending on whether it
is to the left or right of the assignment operator.

Neocons decry language simplification as in the case of Ebonics, but
in fact the unwashed do us all a favor by polishing and streamlining
language in most cases.


And before you say it, yes, I know I am only a poor, ignorant,  hairy
barbarian with no knowledge of a culture (poor miserable thing that it is)
other than my own; that's why I'm asking.


Give me a break.
.

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