Rustom Mody <rustompm...@gmail.com>: > There is a real conflict between the logician's goal and the > educator's. The logician wants to minimize the variety of ideas, > and doesn't mind a long, thin path. The educator (rightly) wants > to make the paths short and doesn't mind–in fact, > prefers–connections to many other ideas. And he cares almost not > at all about the directions of the links.
The natural language has a rigorous grammar plus a lexicon that includes a number of idioms. Nobody has so far been able to codify a natural language completely because the rigorous grammar consists of maybe 10,000 rules. Perl came out of the needs of natural language translation. Perl's novel idea was to make a programming language like a natural language (yes, there had been Cobol). So Perl's language description evades a complete, rigorous description, but it has numerous handy idioms for many common situations. Python showed that while interesting and amusing, Perl's way leads to unnecessary clutter. Why make things complicated when simple will serve everybody's needs best. Marko -- https://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
