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From: laura@utcsstat.UUCP (Laura Creighton)
Newsgroups: net.cog-eng
Subject: Re: expert-friendly: are long names a waste of time?
Message-ID: <1367@utcsstat.UUCP>
Date: Wed, 2-Nov-83 10:50:19 EST
Article-I.D.: utcsstat.1367
Posted: Wed Nov  2 10:50:19 1983
Date-Received: Wed, 2-Nov-83 11:03:22 EST
References: <570@minn-ua.UUCP>, <6061@watmath.UUCP>
Organization: U. of Toronto, Canada
Lines: 57

"compile pascal program" and "debug pascal program" only are reasonable
ways of doing things because of the structure of English. I find
English highly unsatifactory as a language to express day to day
thoughts in, so I am not sure that it is going to be a wonderful
computer language. The most annoying thing that I see about English, is
that grammar teachers to the contrary, there is a pretty strict sense
of word order. You need a <subject and subject modifiers and their
modifiers> followed by a <verb and verb modifiers and their modifiers>
followed by a <subjective completion or object and subjective
completion or object modifiers and their modifiers>.

You can forget about the object or the subj. comp. if it is an
intransitive verb, but often in English the object is the most
important thing. Sometimes the adverb modifiers are -- and often they
are stuck out on the end of the sentence!

A while ago I said "Are we going to go to the Chelsea Inn soon?". Now
the crucial part of this message is "Chelsea Inn" and "soon". I am
hungry and want to get eating. But I had to say 7 useless words before
I could get into the 2 important ones! It is a measure of how useless
word order is in determining meaning in that we have to use STRESS so
much in this language. "Are WE going to the Chelsea Inn soon?" and "Are
we going to THE CHELSEA INN soon?" and "Are we going to the Chelsea Inn
SOON" all mean quite different things.

Pity the new speaker of English!

This is also why certain technical writing in the passive voice goes
over so badly -- English needs a subject so people use "one" or
"people" or maybe even "you" until everyone is tired of it, and then
switches to the passive voice.  However, it is not the voice that
matters, but how quickly you get to the "good stuff". People tend to
say that the passive voice "drags on and on" because in general it
*does* add extra noise words to the sentence, and unless you offset
this disadvantage by getting to the most intersting part of the
sentence faster you will make things *worse*, not better!

I think that "debug pascal program" works because you get into the meat
of the matter "debug". This is not perfectly extensible however. How
many times have you thought?

	Is it "adb program coredump" or "adb coredump program"?
	How about "chmod mode file" or "chmod file mode"?

Clearly, what will sound better to you is going to vary. I always think
that "chmod mode file" is backwards. I think that the file is much more
important than the mode. There are hundreds of files which I own, I
might forget the name, but there are only ~300 modes, only 6 of which I
use with any frequency. However, I meet people who disqagree.

I do not think making the commands any longer is going to help.

"change the mode of file foo to mode" and "change the mode to this of
file foo" are still going to be a problem.

Laura Creighton
utzoo!utcsstat!laura