on Mon, 27 Oct 2003 07:51:17PM -0800, Tom insinuated: > On Mon, Oct 27, 2003 at 10:36:20PM -0500, Nori Heikkinen wrote: > > i'm arguing that _neither_ english _nor_ german is perfectly > > suited to code, since one needs to do some translation to get the > > sentence into the form in which a human would say it. > > > > on top of that, i'm arguing that _no_ language fits this bill. > > think about it -- if there were a human language that could be > > described as easily as a computer language, we would be able to > > express that human language as a finite state automaton, thereby > > solving the language problem, and the whole of AI with it. > > there's a reason we write in a formal, simplified language when we > > code! > > I believe that. Pure vulcan logic. Yet we are confronted with the > bare fact: people code in english.
the distinction that's being missed here is that people don't code in
english, people use english words as symbols in their code. there's a
huge difference.
</nori>
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