On 19 November 2012 16:39, Lindy Mayfield <[email protected]> wrote: > This has been so off topic for so long I don't mind this: I was thinking, at > some point during some sort of stupid thing I had to do when I was bored to > tears: What would SQL be like if it were developed in Finnish? > > Or any other human language to any other computer language. > > Select age, boyfriend_status, phone_number > From Cool_People_Table > where Sex = 'F'; > > It gets me all Lewis Carroll just thinking about it. I cannot even imagine > how to create something like that SQL in Finnish. Something so simple as > that, I cannot even think how a computer could parse it written in an > agglutinative language.
Jabberwocky has, on its own and as part of the whole book, been translated with varying success into many languages, and there are at least two Finnish translations. The minor constraints facing a translator of SQL would be a relative piece of cake... > Though I am a bear of very little brain, so I'm sure it could be done. :-) The translation of Winnie the Pooh into such a relatively English-like language as Esperanto has a minor problem because the English word "pole" is used for both the Earth's north pole, and for the long wooden object supposedly found there. These are two different words in Esperanto, and it makes the pun (or collapse, if you like Paulos's catastrophe model of humor) not so successful. IBM's PL/I compilers from the earliest days provided an infrastructure for translation of PL/I into other languages. But the authors realized that there would be problems, and documented a couple of them, e.g. that the keyword "TO" in "GO TO label" had to be the same "TO" as that in "DO i = 1 TO n". This works in some languages; doubtless it doesn't in others. But all these are trivial tasks in comparison when you think of not just the coined nonsense words in Jabberwocky, and their requirements to rhyme at times, but that there are both commentary and illustrations of the poem within the book that must remain consistent with any translation. > So to bring it a bit back on to topic, English can be weird, but sometimes > quite useful in its own way. PL/I and SQL are surely on-topic for IBM-MAIN, if perhaps not for UCB lookups and serialization. Tony H. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For IBM-MAIN subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to [email protected] with the message: INFO IBM-MAIN
