Re: Hackers and Painters and Lawyers

[Guy Steele - Sun Microsystems Labs <address@hidden>]

   Date: Fri, 16 May 2003 14:44:59 -0400
   From: "Peter J. Wasilko, Esq." <futurist@cloud9.net>
   Subject: Re: Hackers and Painters and Lawyers
   To: Geoffrey Knauth <geoff@knauth.org>
   ...
       Must every new lightweight language look like a cross
   between C and Etruscan?
       
       Take pity on End Users and consider Plain English Programming.
   After all, if lawyers can learn to write in Plain English, surely
   CS people can rise to the challenge!

Take a look at:

 http://www.csse.monash.edu.au/~damian/papers/HTML/Perligata.html
 
which gives PERL a "natural language" syntax.  As an example,
the PERL fragment

  @gunslingers = ( @good, @bad, $Ugly );

can be rendered in English as

  Assign gunslingers goodies and baddies and Mr Ugly.

or, more idiomatically, as

  Assign goodies and baddies and Mr Ugly to gunslingers.

In Latin, this might be

 Bonos tum malos tum Foedum pugnatoribus da.

The difference is that, with the software reported on at the
URL cited above, the Latin version is actually executable.

Is this the direction we want to go?

  for (i = 0; i < n; i++) a[i] = i*i;
  
  Letting i range from zero up to but not including n,
  assign the square of i to element number i of array a.

COBOL, anyone?

--Guy