WJhonson@aol.com wrote:
In a message dated 7/6/2009 12:12:15 AM Pacific Daylight Time, stevagewp@gmail.com writes:
Your point is made, understood, and soundly rebutted. An "english-like" language is not desirable, feasible, or going to happen.>>
I propose that A) you are not the authority invested in deciding this issue; and B) your approach is overly antagonistic and confrontational.
Will
Will,
Although the point could have been put more tactfully, I think the salient point here is that "English-like" programming languages have been tried before many times, and have (with the possible exception of COBOL) consistently been rejected in favour of compact equation-like languages.
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
If you think this an unfair example, please could you show how your proposed English-like language would handle this example better than the above?
-- Neil