Austin Hastings wrote:
At this point, Meestaire ISO-phobic Amairecain Programmaire, you have achieved keyboard parity with the average Swiss six-year-old child.
The question is not about being ISO-phobic or pro-English. **
The question is whether we want a pictographic language. I like the size of the English alphabet. It produces fairly short words, but the words are very robust (people can read words in all orientations, backwards, upside down, in crazy fonts, hand-written, etc.) This is the opposite of Huffman encoding, but just as useful IMHO. I've had the unpleasant job of turning math into software. Hand written formulae can be very difficult to read because mathematics worships Huffman encoding. Multiplication is specified by *nothing*. Exponents are just written a bit smaller and a bit raised. Is this what we want in the core? Does anyone have any references for reading and comprehension rates for different types of languages? I'm ignorant on the subject and this seems like something a Perl programmer should know. - Ken ** I'm probably both. ISO-phobic because I actually represented my company on an ISO standard committee. Pro-English because it's what I use -- being pro-English doesn't make me against everything else. A language would have to be pretty bad to have its native speakers advocate something else!
