At 04:57 AM 8/17/02 -0700, Sean wrote: >Save us! Let a coder streamline the the language? Yowch! That would be a >terrifying trend. First one, then another would opitimise the original >streamlining, and this would go on until we were left with nothing but true >and false. Then some joker would come along and ascribe a symbol to each of >the two remaining words and THEN what would we have?!! A programmer manipulates objectively-defined symbols to express a very particular sort of meaning. But programming languages are very, very strictly defined. Unlike natural language, programming languages very rarely possess symbols that have simultaneous meanings depending on the context. How does a compiler handle ambiguity? It doesn't. We define the rules so there is no ambiguity. When symbols do have multiple meanings, such as operator overloading, or maybe programmer-defined functions with identical names, we can determine for a fact which meaning takes precedence. Natural language is much fuzzier. I wonder whether the built-in strictness of programming languages is a cause, or merely a symptom, of the difficulty we have had in developing artificial intelligence. I'm not aware of any computer's ability to make sense of symbols with multiple, simultaneous and contradictory meanings. (Is this something that fuzzy logic addresses? I'm not familiar with that field, but I think it is mostly handles boolean values with partial truth/partial falsity. So, it might be a help in determining which particular sense of "red", of the many available, is meant in an English language sentence, but it might not help with simultaneous/contradictory. I'm sure there are people on this list who know much more about it than I do!) When I'm thinking of normal, every-day things, my thoughts, to me, feel nowhere near as specific and concrete as they do when I'm programming. When I'm coding something, although one could say that I'm merely expressing ideas in another language, I subjectively feel that my brain is working differently. Maybe it's similar to the differences in spatial vs verbal thinking mentioned previously on the list. -- meersan