On Aug 30, 2006, at 9:40 AM, Darius Clarke wrote:

> Though, sometimes part or all of a syntax of a language comes from
> other software applications or hardware devices that also represent
> the domain or work in the domain, which in turn, might be file bound.
>
> It's the "make the text user readable/editable" that gives me pause.
> Having had a course in Linguistics, I know that the meanings we apply
> to these symbols are greatly subject to various interpretations and
> misinterpretations, especially when we begin to cross cultures and
> cross into non-roman native speakers... just as the same is true with
> body language across cultures. Quick, what's the most user
> recognizable body gesture for agile style updates? Or, letting someone
> know their performance has a social bug, that that they have a bug on
> them?


It seems like you're taking what was originally a very simple idea  
and blowing it up to ridiculous proportions.

You're right. It is never possible to make any communication  
completely unambiguous. However, that doesn't mean we shouldn't try  
to make things as easy as reasonably possible on others.

To be sure, I wasn't talking about communicating with aliens from  
Mungus Prime. I wasn't even talking about cross cultural  
communication. I know the primary audience personally. It's a small  
group, and only one of them (other than me) is a programmer.

When I said I wanted to make the syntax easy to read, I simply meant  
that I wanted to avoid strange constructs and non-standard  
punctuation that is not part of English grammar. Words "like_this" or  
"likeThis" definitely fall into that category. I also want to remove  
any unnecessary words or punctuation. Boil it down to the simplest  
syntax that will do the job.

Again, I'm planning on running a large number of experiments on a  
computer model--each experiment will have different parameters and  
initial conditions. This will generate a lot of data. I want non- 
coding scientists to be able to look at the configuration file and  
understand that, "Oh, the data from run 16 was created using  
configuration XYZ". That's all. It doesn't need to be perfectly  
understandable. It just needs to be as readable as reasonably possible.

-Rich-