On Fri, 16 Jul 2004 10:55:17 -0700, Jonathan Gardner
<jonagard(_at_)amazon(_dot_)com> wrote:
Look at the date on the article - May 2001. This paper is part of the bible
of language design. I've seen it passed around in pretty much all major
discussions of new languages.
Very true.
I'd also recommend (whether you like perl or loath it) that you read
some of the writings of Larry Wall who is, by training, a linguist.
In particular Natural Language Principles -
http://www.wall.org/~larry/natural.html
and an explanation of chunking - http://www.wall.org/~larry/chunking
are well worth reading if only to understand what modern languages are
often trying to achieve.
Both make points that seem more and more valuable to me as time goes
by: "Topicalization" and "Pronominalization" are lovely principles
that make a language scale down, a key point of Paul Graham's article,
when a major failing of so many systems is that they spend so long
trying to make something scalable upwards that they forget about
scaling down, and so no-one actually finds a way to start using it
(see Ada, .NET, UML, CMM, ASN.1, Z39.50, and dare I suggest Apache,
Samba and quite a few open source tools).
--
T