Re: Languages: The Bigger the Uglier (was: Re: Aliasing in ISO C)

Laurent GASSER <gasser@ilw.agrl.ethz.ch>
23 Feb 1996 00:18:42 -0500

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[3 earlier articles]
Languages: The Bigger the Uglier (was: Re: Aliasing in ISO C) rfg@monkeys.com (1996-02-19)
Re: Languages: The Bigger the Uglier (was: Re: Aliasing in ISO C) jgm@CS.Cornell.EDU (1996-02-19)
Re: Languages: The Bigger the Uglier (was: Re: Aliasing in ISO C) Martin.Jourdan@inria.fr (1996-02-21)
Re: Languages: The Bigger the Uglier (was: Re: Aliasing in ISO C) robison@kai.com (Arch Robison) (1996-02-21)
Re: Languages: The Bigger the Uglier (was: Re: Aliasing in ISO C) hbaker@netcom.com (1996-02-22)
Languages: The Bigger the Uglier (was: Re: Aliasing in ISO C) dave@occl-cam.demon.co.uk (Dave Lloyd) (1996-02-22)
Re: Languages: The Bigger the Uglier (was: Re: Aliasing in ISO C) gasser@ilw.agrl.ethz.ch (Laurent GASSER) (1996-02-23)
Re: Languages: The Bigger the Uglier (was: Re: Aliasing in ISO C) fabre@gr.osf.org (Christian Fabre) (1996-02-23)
Re: Languages: The Bigger the Uglier (was: Re: Aliasing in ISO C) WStreett@shell.monmouth.com (1996-02-23)
Re: Languages: The Bigger the Uglier (was: Re: Aliasing in ISO C) hbaker@netcom.com (1996-02-23)
Re: Languages: The Bigger the Uglier (was: Re: Aliasing in ISO C) k2consult@aol.com (1996-02-26)
Re: Languages: The Bigger the Uglier (was: Re: Aliasing in ISO C) henry@zoo.toronto.edu (Henry Spencer) (1996-02-27)
Re: Languages: The Bigger the Uglier (was: Re: Aliasing in ISO C) anton@complang.tuwien.ac.at (1996-02-27)
[12 later articles]
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From: Laurent GASSER <gasser@ilw.agrl.ethz.ch>
Newsgroups: comp.compilers
Date: 23 Feb 1996 00:18:42 -0500
Organization: Eidgenossische Technische Hochschule Zurich
References: 96-01-037 96-02-171 96-02-187 96-02-248
Keywords: standards

Arch Robison <robison@kai.com> wrote:
>Here's a solution:
>
> 1. Every year, put N language judges in a separate room. The
> judges would be good programmers, but not language lawyers. I
> leave this distinction to the reader.
>
> 2. Give each judge T hours to write down their description of the
> language.
>
> 3. Remove any feature from the language that K or more judges
> forgot to describe.
>
>If K=1, this is the extreme of making the language the intersection of
>what people remember.


I am trying to see if this could be a solution. Let say that I am
interested in the core of a natural language like English.


Most people will agree that around 2000-3000 words are enough to
sustain elementary arguments. Applying the test above, would a hunter
in the mountains select the same set of words than the fishermann at
sea? Surely not.


They would have a limited common set, but both could not live without
a specific extension, useless to the other. Some of these concepts
could be painfully derived from the common set, others cannot (steep
for the hunter, stream for the fisherman).


I consider this to hold for computer science as well. The test above
will reflect the common experience of the judges. Net specialists
take advantage of different parts of a language than database or
scientific computing ones (even at level of operators like string
concatenation, additions, I/O,...).
[Having written both books and software, I can say that if I were
writing 1500 page collaborative books with frequent updates, often not
by the original author, and in which small errors could make the
entire book illegible, I'd want to use a considerably smaller
vocabulary than I do in my books now. -John]


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