On Jan 16, 3:15 am, alex23 <wuwe...@gmail.com> wrote: > On Jan 16, 5:39 pm, Erik Max Francis <m...@alcyone.com> wrote: > > > Inform 7 has some > > interesting ideas, but I think the general problem with English-like > > programming language systems is that once you get into the nitty gritty > > details, you end up having to know exactly the right things to type, > > This has always been my impression of Inform 7. I have a lot of > respect for what they've set out to achieve but English isn't exactly > known for its lack of ambiguity. This is great for literature but not > so helpful for programming. > > > which ultimately get just as complicated as a more traditional > > programming language syntax. > > And much more verbose, as well.
Since I've used Inform 7 I can say that the syntactic problem isn't that great: once you get far enough into a project to matter the specialized constraints just sink in. It's more work to learn, but no stranger than Python's indentation scheme. The bigger problem for the comparison is that Inform 7 is a Domain Specific Language (DSL), not a general purpose language. Not only that, but the domain is pretty much everyday experience (with a large dollop of fantasy, of course). All the feedback is that the results are quite readable to non-programmers. This is why well over half of the mailing list posts on the authoring mailing list are about Inform 7. I really don't think that using natural language for a general purpose programming language is a good idea, for reasons that several other people have already said. I think it's a great idea for DSLs, at least in some cases. The other really major problem is that I don't think anyone really knows how to process natural language. The direction that natural language processing has taken in the last 50 years has come up lacking big-time. It does a good job in a single domain, but try to build something that crosses domains and nothing works. There isn't a good alternative in sight John Roth -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list