dly <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > The statement: > > All programming languages have things in common with the English > > language. > seems unnecessarily Anglo-centric. The balance of the text makes > no distinction between the programming language J and the > metalanguage J terms used to describe it. This could present > difficulty for a student of J who might prefer a metalanguage > description of J to be translated into their own language. I would > suggest
To risk veering further and further off in to meta meta-land: Think of the word 'English', not as an absolute term, but as a context-relative one. Since this document is written in English, it is naturally oriented towards English-speaking readers. A French translation would translate this word into 'Francais' rather than 'Anglais'. Or, if you find this insufficiently abstract, you could render it as 'Human language' (or, if you care to extend the analogy to other sentient species, 'Natural language') > All languages have elements in common such as the component symbols, > words or terms that have defined meaning and the rules of syntax or > grammar that tell you how to combine the words into sentences to > communicate. Languages have such elements in common, but they may assign different names to them. J tends to use English (see note above) terms to these, to strengthen the analogy to human languages, as opposed to machine languages. I came to J from APL, which used more conventional programming terms. I found the English terminology helped to make the J syntax model much easier to learn and comprehend. -- Mark D. Niemiec <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For information about J forums see http://www.jsoftware.com/forums.htm
