> On Mon, Jun 22, 2009 at 4:12 PM, Minimiscience<minimiscie...@gmail.com> wrote: > I don't think natural language -- especially the abomination that is English > -- is the best guide for understanding logical operations (why, yes, I *do* > speak Lojban; how did you know?).
To which Jon Lang replied: > You're aware that Perl was designed by a linguist, with an eye toward > incorporating natural language concepts, right? Let me make a small digression to expand upon what Jon said. There's a reason natlangs don't work like loglangs: human thought isn't based on logic. Instead, logic is an artificial construct which, while quite useful within its domain, is not necessarily optimal for communicating with humans - not even when the other end of the communication is a computer. Computers are built around logic, of course. But while traditional programming was based on teaching humans to think like the computer, the progression from machine code to assembly to ever-higher-level languages has been about making the computers accept programming languages with increasingly natural human language features. Perl has synonyms (TMTOWTDI), homonyms (context, MMD), other sorts of ambiguity.... just like natlangs. (And no need to pick on poor English especially; it's a perfectly cromulent language, however suboptimal it might be from an auxlang or loglang perspective.) All of which is just by way of agreeing with Jon: formal logic is not the primary motivator behind Perl's design. So while it should be considered, it's not a knockout punch to say "but logic doesn't work that way." -- Mark J. Reed <markjr...@gmail.com>
