BNF. Backus Naur/Normal Form. I hated it more than Pseudo-Code in University. - Ted MacNEIL eamacn...@yahoo.ca Twitter: @TedMacNEIL
-----Original Message----- From: Lindy Mayfield <lindy.mayfi...@sas.com> Sender: IBM Mainframe Discussion List <IBM-MAIN@LISTSERV.UA.EDU> Date: Tue, 20 Nov 2012 17:08:07 To: <IBM-MAIN@LISTSERV.UA.EDU> Reply-To: IBM Mainframe Discussion List <IBM-MAIN@LISTSERV.UA.EDU> Subject: Re: "New" way to do UCB lookups Dammit, Janet. I did something I didn't think I needed to do. I went through one Rexx exec over 3000 lines long, which isn't really so big when you count that I added hundreds of lines of comments. (That was a joke.) There wasn't anything there that couldn't be as easily as Rexx be defined by (Oh, I forgot the acronym and google didn't help me because I forgot it, BNC or something similar), but you mentioned it many times. The extended version. And IMO, any language if a special design (that I cannot describe) could satisfy those requirements if that language is of a certain design like Rexx. Perl? Maybe, but I don't write Perl. I don't like it. I think that some computer languages are very easy, and some almost impossible to do in any other language than English, or similar enough to English than to make it a nit. My Finnish isn't yet good enough to read a novel, but my Finnish is good enough to read a novel written in Finnish and translated to English. Your points are very spot on. If you simply look for an MVS operator command that may be next to impossible in any other language than English, then I'll try to find one in Finnish. Kind regards Lindy -----Original Message----- From: IBM Mainframe Discussion List [mailto:IBM-MAIN@LISTSERV.UA.EDU] On Behalf Of John Gilmore Sent: Tuesday, November 20, 2012 6:36 PM To: IBM-MAIN@LISTSERV.UA.EDU Subject: Re: "New" way to do UCB lookups One of the translators of Tolkien into Italian is an old friend, and I have discussed with him some of the problems he encountered in doing so. Between two Indo-European languages translation that conveys substance is always possible, but words must often be replaced by phrases, and this can be highly problematic. Consider the character Strider. Italian has no equivalent of the verb 'to stride'. Fine, camminare a gran passi, walk in large steps, conveys the sense accurately. Unfortunately, however, a character named Camminatore-a-gran-passi has the same connotation for an Italian as Walker-in-large-steps has for an American: It strongly suggests an American-Indian character. (Italians know all about 'cowboys e indiani'.) In the end 'Strider' was left untranslated in the Italian text. Similar problems abound in translations of Pushkin from Russian into other European languages. Pushkin's texts are full of puns, deliberately contrived ambiguities, connotation-laden names, and the like too; and finding equivalents for them in another language is very difficult. In the upshot, people who, since they cannot read Russian, must depend upon inadequate translations, may wonder why Russians regard Pushkin as the equal of Shakespeare and Dante. Chomsky has maintained that there is little reason to suppose that translation is possible in general, and this is not because he does not know that it has been done brilliantly. (Unfortunately, the canonical examples are Catullus's Latin translations of some short Greek lyrics of Sappho, which somehow manage to be at once literal and perfect. It would be agreeable if they were still accessible to non-specialists, but they are not.) Text translation and the translation of, say, FORTRAN into sequences of machine instructions have some things in common, but they are also very different. Semantic ambiguity has been largely banished from procedural languages, and their translation is thus very much simpler than the translation of, for example, arbitrary Russian text into English. John Gilmore, Ashland, MA 01721 - USA ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For IBM-MAIN subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to lists...@listserv.ua.edu with the message: INFO IBM-MAIN ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For IBM-MAIN subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to lists...@listserv.ua.edu with the message: INFO IBM-MAIN ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For IBM-MAIN subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to lists...@listserv.ua.edu with the message: INFO IBM-MAIN
