-Caveat Lector-
> It's not. If you go to <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> you will
> find introductory course materials on C programming. There should be just
> one final assignment for this course: Write a C program which is a set of
> menus and prompts in standard English and which accounts for all of the
> things you have been taught C will do up to this level. That program would
> be 10 pages or less.
Natural English language recognition is not that trivial. The english
language structure is far too complicated for a simple computer to interpret
easily. For example take the following news headlines, and you'll see how
interpreting english can be difficult:
Squad helps dog bite victim
Red-hot star to wed astronomer
Helicopter powered by human flies
Once-sagging cloth diaper industry saved by full dumps
America pushes bottle up Iraqis
Obviously, each of those sentences can have at least two, if not more
meanings. Humans have enough knowledge about the world to decided that the
squad wasn't helping the dog bite people, or that the red hot star was a
celebrity rather than an actual celestial body. A computer doesn't have that
knowledge though, and can't interpret those sentences correctly.
Additionally, passive voice is often difficult for computer natural language
systems.
"Could you open my file for me?" be answered with a verbal "Yes" or by
opening the file is the most simplistic example, but I'm sure this
intelligent crowd can come up with some better examples.
>
> I've messed around with Visual Basic a little
> > and found the language rather difficult to grasp. The GUI is easy to
> > figure out, but the actual programming code is not intuitive. As you're
> > typing the code, lists of available commands will pop up to help you, but
> > still, there is a certain format that must be followed or you'll end up
> > with bugs galore.
>
> Everything these computer languages do can be expressed in standard
> English. The standard English can be perfected to make it as clear as
> possible and condensed into a set of menus and prompts.
In all honesty, learning the programming language is frequently the easiest
part of computer programming. When it comes down to it, Visual Basic, or
C++, or C# or Java are just refinements of the english language:
if( a < 4 ) {
a = a + 4;
newMenuItem = strcat( "Open file number", itoa( a ) );
addMenuItem( fileMenu, newMenuItem );
} else {
a = 5;
addMenuItem( fileMenu, "No files found");
}
now let's look at the english version of this.
If the variable a is less than the number four, add the number four to the
variable a and save that value back into the variable a, then append a string
version of the value in the variable a to the string "Open file number " and
then store that value into the variable newMenuItem, then add the string
contained in the variable newMenuItem to the file menu, otherwise store the
number five into the variable a, and then add the string "No files found" to
the file menu.
Now imagine trying to write an entire computer program that way. I converted
8 lines of very simple and uncomplicated computer code into one enormous
run-on sentence that is nearly impossible to read without becoming confused.
> > If someone wants to use a program to load a certain database file and
> > display the contents of a set of cells, then one should be able to write
> > the following:
> >
> > If the user clicks on LOAD, then load the file in selector 2 and display
> > cells A3 to B7.
> >
> > If a programming language can understand what '{\|/};' means, then it can
> > certainly understand what "do this and do that" means.
>
> Bingo. If you want to do this then you _____________: If you want to do
> that then you _____________ The "Geek Conspiracy" is brilliant though. It
> has kept this make-work project going for a long, long time!
The difficulty comes in defining what you mean by "Display Cells A3 - B7".
You have to specify whether you want those in the same window, if you want to
flash them on the screen briefly, and then close the window? Do you want to
open a new window? Do you want the window they are displayed in to be
printable? Do you want people to be able to copy and paste from that window.
How big should the window be? Should the user be able to edit the contents
of the window? If they save the window, should it overwrite the old file, or
should it create a new file?
When it comes down to it, computer programming is a highly technical skill,
and as such, it can generally be expressed in very simple terms, but requires
a lot more skill than it appears to at first glance. Building a car can be
defined as "Take bolt a, use it to attach plate b to panel c", and could be
expressed as an entire book of this sort of step by step instructions, but it
wouldn't teach you how to drive the car, or what each part of the car does.
Computer programming is similar. Putting together a string of programming
statements to do something is easy, but computer progammers aren't paid for
stringing together the statements, they're paid to design a program.
=====
--
"If you don't have some vaguely Celtic-sounding name going on, what is the
point. I ask you. Next time you create a character, ask yourself: have I used enough
Y's?" - Tycho, from Penny-Arcade
Adam Ness
Cam Drone #2002021697
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