On Fri, Aug 01, 2014 at 11:50:29AM -0700, Walter Bright via Digitalmars-d wrote:
> On 8/1/2014 7:08 AM, Daniel Gibson wrote:
> >I'm not a native speaker..
>
> I couldn't tell - your english is excellent.
>
> (I'm always careful not to read too much subtlety into word choice by
> non-native speakers. For a classic example, if a native speaker says
> "fine" it means he strongly disagrees with you. A non-native speaker
> likely means he thinks you have a great idea!)
My favorite quote along this line:
A linguistics professor was lecturing to his class one day. "In
English," he said, "A double negative forms a positive. In some
languages, though, such as Russian, a double negative is still a
negative. However, there is no language wherein a double
positive can form a negative." A voice from the back of the room
piped up, "Yeah, yeah."
Also, it depends on which regional dialect you speak. On the east side
of the Pond, a native speaker saying "fine" means he agrees with you.
West of the Pond, it *can* mean disagreement, but it can also mean
concession -- it all depends on the intonation. Which, of course, is
absent in online textual communications.
> >.. but even if I were: words used for constructs/function-names/...
> >in programming often don't 100% match their "real" meaning (as used
> >in human communication)[1] - why should it be different for assert(),
> >especially when not implemented/used like that in many popular
> >programming languages?
>
> Every discipline has its own jargon. For example, what would "sick"
> mean to a motorhead?
Also keep in mind that not everyone knows what a "motorhead" is. Google
and Wikipedia (*including* the WP disambiguation page) points to various
music bands, but no actual definition for the word!
> We also had quite a struggle coming up with the name "immutable".
> Every term we tried seemed inadequate, until we noticed that we were
> always explaining "XXX means the data is immutable", and realized that
> "immutable" was what we were after.
If only the same amount of care was exercised when the syntax of
is-expressions was designed! Oh wait, was it ever *designed*?! ;-)
T
--
One reason that few people are aware there are programs running the internet is
that they never crash in any significant way: the free software underlying the
internet is reliable to the point of invisibility. -- Glyn Moody, from the
article "Giving it all away"
