Path: utzoo!utgpu!news-server.csri.toronto.edu!rutgers!att!cbnewsc!lgm
From: lgm@cbnewsc.att.com (lawrence.g.mayka)
Newsgroups: comp.lang.misc
Subject: Re: The Universal Language (Was Re: Efficient Fortran)
Message-ID: <1990Aug7.020234.13032@cbnewsc.att.com>
Date: 7 Aug 90 02:02:34 GMT
References: <23893@megaron.cs.arizona.edu> <1356@fs1.ee.ubc.ca>
Organization: AT&T Bell Laboratories
Lines: 34

In article <1356@fs1.ee.ubc.ca> mikeb@coho.ee.ubc.ca (Mike Bolotski) writes:
>In article <23893@megaron.cs.arizona.edu>, gudeman@cs.arizona.edu (David Gudeman) writes:
>> language will probably not be small, and it may be divided into many
>> sublanguages, each appropriate for different problems, but there could
>> be a unifying framework and user interface.  In fact a lot of current
>
>This is a cop-out.  If the language is defined to be English, then all
>currently existing languages are only sublanguages in a common framework.
>A language with a sufficient amount of sufficiently different "sublanguages"
>cannot be said to be a language.  

The previous two sentences are self-contradictory.  English indeed
includes myriad sublanguages for any and every specialty, yet is most
certainly "said to be a language."  (Consider, especially, *spoken*
English, which by necessity includes even highly technical notations
of all kinds.)

Your objection about the "sufficient differences" between sublanguages
is a matter of degree, not of kind.  Would you be more inclined to
consider English a unified language if its grammatical structure and
vocabulary extension were more regular?  Perhaps Esperanto would meet
your requirements. 1/2 :-)

But perhaps the programming-language equivalent of a universal syntax
is

(OPERATOR OPERAND OPERAND ...)


	Lawrence G. Mayka
	AT&T Bell Laboratories
	lgm@iexist.att.com

Standard disclaimer.