Hi, Thursday, July 22, 2004, 12:14:13 AM, graywolf wrote:
> Interesting, Bob. Did you write this off the top of your head, or just do some > quick research? You always seem to come up with details of things I just vaguely > remember from decades ago. I think I looked Basic up in an encyclopedia when I > was a kid after coming across it in several SF books I had read. The SF'ers > liked Esperanto, another artificial language, too. Before I was involved with computers, my background was in languages and linguistics. I'm also qualified to teach English as a foreign language. I've been interested in controlled English for writing specifications for several years. The Cobuild dictionary has a very good, clear style for writing definitions - much clearer than most conventional dictionaries. It's a help to me because I've had complaints from programmers that I use too many long words which they don't understand. Something like Cobuild helps me to find the simpler equivalents or write a good definition. I found that people were not reading documentation that I wrote, which is worse than not writing it at all. I have a very large vocabulary and it's easy to forget that many other people do not. So I try to simplify the language I use in the specs, and write for the audience. However, I also have qualifications in discrete maths and Z, which very few of the programmers I spec for understand. So I try to find a middle ground between the 'Victorian novel' approach, and a couple of pages full of squiggles. Using an informal controlled English approach helps me do this. -- Cheers, Bob
