On Tue, Oct 2, 2018 at 21:10 ToddAndMargo <toddandma...@zoho.com> wrote:
> If you have a free moment, speaking to "have", the diagram here > is a work of art: > > https://www.freethesaurus.com/have > > I know there a lot of English as a second language speaker on this > group. The above thesaurus uses diagrams and is wonderfully > well done. It's nice, certainly, but I think you miss my point. None of the words in that diagram can be used as a substitute for "$x" in "I $x already seen that movie". There is no word in English that can be placed there instead. "Have" in English, like [] in Perl, has some extremely low-level purposes that are very difficult to describe in the way we can describe most words. Asking for a thesaurus-like explanation of those purposes is not merely unreasonable; it's literally impossible. That doesn't mean those definitions _should not be_ in the document; they MUST be in the document, if it is to have any claim to being an exhaustive reference. Yet there is no way to set forth the definition without using some abstruse terminology that, if you look up _its_ definitions, will get you no closer to understanding $x above. These low-level definitions WILL confuse anyone who is merely seeking meaning at a "common knowledge" level. Omitting them is impossible. Making them understandable to the common-knowledge-level user of the document is also impossible. So including these very arcane definitions—even at the risk of confusion to those who will look at a definition expecting to be able to understand 100% of it on first reading—is necessary; confusing those common-knowledge seekers is a necessary evil. The lexicographers must assume that those learning English will learn these purposes of "have" elsewhere; otherwise they would need to embed an entire grammar of English under the definition of "have". So it is for the [] postcircumfix. For those of us who have been following Perl 6 development for 18 years, the fact that it—and almost every other low-level particle—can be described at all in such a way is a remarkable triumph of the language. But that cannot coexist with your desire to look at the perl6 doc for [] and understand all of it as a non-expert Perl 6 programmer. Trey
