-----Robin wrote: parallels for this in English can be seen in English group names - a gaggle of geese, a troop of monkeys, a knot of toads, a pack of dogs. Anyone care to suggest a good one for a group of perl programmers ? a larry, a wall, a camel ..... ;-) -----end quote
I'll throw my 0.02$ in for "wall." Just imagine it, a wall of programmers. Being the linguist that I am, and working on my thesis for graduation hust now, I'm trying to keep off this discussion. But I thought of one thing that I haven't seen brought up which only adds another glitch to the idea of, if nothing else, cross-linguistic regexes. Namely that in Japanese you can have different kanji (or groups of kana) that spell out the same thing, in so far as pronunciation goes. While this isn't much of a problem if you're looking for a specific word, if you were to want to look at the sounds (you're a linguist say, or you want to rewrite all the kanji as kana say) you'd have to add in a whole 'nother bag of worms. Of course regarding that second thing (kanji->kana) you have the opposite problem where one kanji can represent different strings of sounds too. ~wren
