On May 14, 2012, at 12:00 AM, Aristotle Pagaltzis wrote:
* Peter da Silva <pe...@taronga.com> [2012-05-14 02:45]:
* Imagining that there's some relationship between computer languages
and human languages.
* See COBOL
* See Perl
* Imagining that there's no relationship between computer languages
and
linguistic cognition.
* Mathematical notation is ideal for programming!
The only reason to design a programming language is so humans can read
it, after all the computer is just as happy to run machine code
written
by humans manually as machine code written by a compiler.
But confusing "designed for human cognition" with "let's make it look
like English" is certainly stupid and hateful. Aside from COBOL, see
also AppleScript.
See also HyperTalk.
Josh