Re: Implementing an English-Like Language - a Friendly Reply (Was:I just thought I'd ask..)

robin wrote:
> interested in working with me on programming a programming
> language in perl? <snip> would be based on using english
> to code with...ie: all of the keywords would be english words

Hi,
An interesting idea. If the language will be something screen reader
friendly that reads out well with a speech synth and no punctuation, I'm
definitely willing to at least give it a try as a user. It might be easier
in the beginning to try building something on top of Perl with macroes and
source filtering rather than going all the way and trying to re-invent the
wheel in things like regular expressions. Take a practical test. If you're
head hurts after reading this lex man page, I would seriously urge you not
to consider building a stand-alone full-blown programming language:

http://unixhelp.ed.ac.uk/CGI/man-cgi?lex

This is getting OT but I've never liked Unix man pages myself. Descriptive
words that come to mind include terse, cold, cryptic, lack of examples,
needlessly techy and half a dozen others that I don't care to mention
<smile>.

Wouldn't it be a lot simpler if the output was Perl in the end but didn't
look like it to the user? One way to do it is through the Filter::Simple
source filtering construct. See your

%perldir%\lib\Html\Filter\

Folder for usage information. %perldir% here is a DOS environment variable
that you should substitute with the location of your perl folder e.g.
c:\perl\

Could anyone name an existing programming language that is TUring complete,
not terribly minimal and relies as much on English words and as little on
punctuation as possible? I'm naturally interested both because I doubt the
success rate of this perl project and as inspiration for the syntax.

Regarding the other posts in this thread, personally, I don't see the point
in including snide remarks and or newbie bashing even in messages like this.
It really doesn't help anyone in the end the least the original poster. Sure
I do admit the subject does not convey the body of the message really and
there are not too many details of this language implementation idea. I guess
robin just had the idea and hasn't given the implementation details too much
thought at this point. Stil, a number of projects come to mind that I would
probably never have done had I known how much work they would be. But they
benefited me greatly and I learned a lot in the end, even if the projects
didn't went as well as I had anticipated.

--
With kind regards Veli-Pekka Tätilä (vtatila@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx)
Accessibility, game music, synthesizers and programming:
http://www.student.oulu.fi/~vtatila/


.

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