[WikiEN-l] MediaWiki is getting a new programming language

[stevertigo]

On Mon, Jul 6, 2009 at 3:54 AM, Neil Harris<usenet at tonal.clara.co.uk> wrote:

> Consider the difference between the ease of writing, say, the Python-like
>  print "%02x" % find(":", param[1])
> or even the Lisp-like
>  (print (fmt "%02x" (find ":" (param 1))))
> compared to writing an "English-like" equivalent such as
>  PRINT THE NUMBER OF CHARACTERS BEFORE THE FIRST OCCURRENCE OF THE
> COLON CHARACTER IN THE FIRST POSITIONAL PARAMETER FORMATTED AS A
> TWO-DIGIT ZERO-PADDED HEXADECIMAL NUMBER USING LOWERCASE LETTERS FOR THE
> HEX DIGITS A TO F

Your example is a bit unfair though, Neil. For one, how would it be parsed?
Two, it only implies and does not explicitly state the "find/search"
functionality
you use in the examples.

Interestingly, this seems to follow the useful form for a teaching tool.
Compromising between efficiently terse syntax and efficiently expressive
natural language gets... ?

-Steve