So much for that....

[jc at trillian.mit.edu (John Chambers)]

Probably not, but there is a lot of potential in perl 6 for just this
sort  of  thing.  Have you read Larry Wall's "Apocalypse" series?  If
you're interested in perl's future, you oughta:
  http://www.perl.com/pub/au/Wall_Larry

Some of his idea for making perl more extensible  and  definable  get
awfully  close to making it an "uncol" (UNiversal COmputer Language),
and one that could be used as a spoken language.

Of course, the idea of a pronouncable programming language is  hardly
new. There was a lot of discussion of this back in the 60's and 70's.
So far, it hasn't led much of anywhere, but who knows what the future
might bring?

OTOH, none of this is likely to ever have  much  effect  on  opinions
about  expressivity.  One of the ongoing jokes among linguists is the
universal claim that "Language X can express things that  language  Y
can't." This is always true for human languages, of course, no matter
what X and Y you choose, and when you interchange X and Y, it's still
true.  To non-programmers, it will always be obvious that programming
languages can't be expressive, and there's nothing you could possibly
do to convince them otherwise.



John Tsangaris writes:
| Speaking of free speech... have any groups popped up yet which are using
| perl as their main language of communication?  I figured when politicians
| said perl is not considered an expressive language and thus not protected
| under free speech laws, there would be groups starting to speak solely in
| perl, just to prove the politicians wrong.
|
| Has that begun?
|
|
| my $john = new Person(engineer);
| $john->echo("Regards");
|
| :-)