[osflash] New Language RFC

[Cortlandt Winters]

Hi Till.

Thank you.

Of course I count 227 instead of 155 characters which is about 150% bigger
and there still are things that you would need to do to cary the state of
conditionals throughout that you aren't doing like whether or not Jim
actually called. In fact a lot of information is getting lost in the
translation here and none of this yet has any of the verbose type, import,
interface, static, public, private, protected nonsense that I was speaking
of which makes me roll my eyes at Java and as2.

Every time you concatenated a set of tokens into a function call like "go to
store" becomming gotoStore you illustrate the power of grammars over
functions and reinforce my point. Are you going to have 40 functions to
cover every destination parameter "store" and relationtype "to"?

It's not talking to the computer or making it seem like you don't need to
learn a new language, it is using the inherant power of grammar over other
constructs. Humans created natural languages as efficient ways of
communicating. It's just a matter of reusing what was developed there and
intelligently selecting various subsets that are easy enough to automate.

Thanks for responding though. I do really need to stop talking about this
and get back to work however. I apologise in advance if I at some point
become better focused and stop responding to this thread.

On 11/1/05, Till Schneidereit <tschneidereit at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> > "Go to the store. Get some healthy food. Come back home by 1:00 for
> > Jim's call. Waste some time on a stupid topic. Call Jim back if he
> > doesn't call by 2:00." Write that up for me in any language you want
> > that you think is more terse and I'll sign up for it.
>
> Easy:
> gotoStore ();
> getHealthyFood ();
> waitTillTime ([1:00 in whatever time format]);
> getBack ();
> while (time < [1:00 in whatever time format]) {
> if (!jimCalls) {
> wasteTime ();
> }
> }
> callJim ();
>
> This isn't really more terse, but not really more verbose, either.
>
> What I want to say is that I think the real problem isn't with the syntax
> but with the fact that people tend to understand commands that are way
> underdetermined just by "parsing" the context of their uttering.
>
> In this case, You don't need to tell the person you are talking to what it
> means to go to the store, because he learned the general concept of "going
> to a store" earlier in his life and can (hopefully) deduce what store to go
> to from the context of the conversation.
> With a program, you don't have the benefit of being able to rely on that
> much information being present beforehand and therefore have to be way more
> verbose in describing what you want it to do.
>
> For what it's worth, I'm all for developing systems that are able to "get"
> what the user wants them to do by deducing lots of stuff from some context
> semi-intelligently, but until those are developed, I think it's best not to
> pretend that you can "talk" to a computer by making the programming language
> similar to "real" languages. IMO, this just makes it seem like you don't
> have to learn a new language when really, you have to.
>
> cheers,
> till
>
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