So much for that....

[david at thekramers.net (David Kramer)]

On Fri, 2 Nov 2001, John Tsangaris wrote:

> >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.

> But that's the same as saying because you don't speak spanish, it
> isn't expressive. Of course you can't express anything in a language
> you do not speak.

I disagree.  Computer languages are formed to tell computers what to do.
Human languages are used for so many things that computer languages were
not designed for, that they are not really interchangeable (it is almost
as hard to get computers to understand freeform speach).

I may say to my wife: "I heard there's a 60% chance of rain today.  I
think you should bring an umbrella to work.  Do you have one, or do you
need to borrow one from me?"

In order to even START communicating things like this in a computer
language (not counting stupid cheating ways like in print statements or
nouns for variable names), you need to:

(1) Have a class heirarchy that contains all objects in the universe,
real, imaginary, or theoretical, complete with hundreds (on the average)
of methods each.  And you thought the Human Genome project was big,

(2) A deeper concept of the relationship between objects than "is a" and
"has a"

(3) Some equivalent of the punctuation marks that can change the meaning
of a sentence, like the question mark, and conjugation.

(4) Strong fuzzy logic functionality, probablility and statistsics, the
concepts of needs, wants, emotions, and desires.

I'm sure there's a whole slew more.  AI sorta tries to do this.

> If there was a large enough group of people able to communicate solely
> via perl (many people speak spanish AND english) and still get a
> concept across, then politicians would be forced to accept it as
> expressive.

You've failed before you started by trying to get politicians to
understand technical issues without waving money in their face.  Consider
who you would be up against in your fight.  Yup, the biggest of big
businesses.

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DDDD   David Kramer                           http://thekramers.net
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DKK D  "Where's the kaboom?  There was supposed to be an
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