And it's not the shades of meaning, but the gramatical constructs that are the focus here, subsets of natural language can be well formalized and have been proven to be very usefull. Do while, for all in, if else, I'd like to see set operations, message passing and grammars in languages go a step further in this direction.
Also there are whole categorys of parsing based on things like conditionalized internal states and state query mechanisms that have yet to make it into popular languages as big features, but which is critical to how people communicate and would be hugely usefull to the small domain of application programming over a network. "Put those onions in the cupboard. That cupboard? No, the one to it's left." When grammars and protocols are a part of your programming language instead of what you use to generate static ones and zero's that kind of interchange becomes easy to program and leads to more flexible and interesting programs. Since this language will be passing a lot over the wire, I'd say it is worth thinking about.
Anyway, not that I think Nico has any interest in this, but he asked what we'd like. That's what I'd like. Things like classes for grammars and protocols and a syntax that reads naturally.
-Cort
On 11/1/05, Benjamin Jackson <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
On Oct 28, 2005, at 2:46 AM, Cortlandt Winters wrote:
> I really liked a language called toolbook written in the early 90's
> because the code could be written to read like a natural language.
>
> "to handle buttonclick send rotateview to gyro and put green key into
> first word of second paragraph of table layout"
I have to respectfully disagree. Anyone who's taken even a passing
glance at Applescript will tell you that natural language programming
languages end up looking like anything but...
John Gruber expressed this much more eloquently than I can here:
http://daringfireball.net/2005/09/englishlikeness_monster
IMHO the levels of complexity and shades of meaning that human language
allows for are, at least for the foreseeable future, beyond what can be
translated into 1s and 0s.
___________________
Ben Jackson
Diretor de Desenvolvimento
+55 (21) 9997-0593
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
http://www.incomumdesign.com
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