On Friday, 27 April 2018 at 00:18:05 UTC, H. S. Teoh wrote:
On Thu, Apr 26, 2018 at 04:26:30PM -0700, Walter Bright via
Digitalmars-d wrote: [...]
[...]
People often complain about how redundant natural languages
are... not realizing that it actually provides, in addition to
being easier to read, some degree of built-in error-correction
and resilience in a lossy medium. Think of reading a text that
has occasional typos or omitted words. Most of the time, you
can still figure out what it's saying in spite of the "syntax
errors". Or talking over the phone with lots of static noise.
You can still make out what the other person is saying, even if
some words are garbled. Computer languages aren't quite at
that level of self-correctiveness and resilience yet, but I'd
like to think we're on the way there.
Redundancy is not always a bad thing.
[...]
Yes, something language designers often fail to account for.
Well, many programmers also tend to write without the awareness
that 5 months later, someone (i.e., themselves :-D) will be
staring at that same piece of code and going "what the heck was
the author thinking when he wrote this trash?!".
[...]
And Java. ;-)
T
Yep. Good point. German is more redundant than English (case
endings) and it's easier to re-construct garbled text. But
natural languages tend to remove redundancy (e.g. case endings
when the relation is clear) - up to a certain point! But
redundancy is needed and good. Maybe natural languages show us
how far you can go before you get in trouble.
