[mercury-users] constructor class syntax
Ralph Becket
rbeck at microsoft.com
Fri Nov 5 01:52:54 AEDT 1999
> Okay, okay, what I *meant* was, contextual grammar is a nice idea, as
> opposed to context-free grammar. Perl's treatment of plurals is
> interesting (a list without walls, if you like). Larry Wall is a
> linguist, and some of the features of Perl reflect his linguistic insight.
> By the way, Perl has records indexed by name (hashes). Dare
> I suggest Mercury should adopt '$record{field}' ?
>
> ;)
Noooooooooo! Context sensitive grammar is a terrible idea. I've worked
with computational linguists and IMHO they were hopeless at software
engineering.
Linguists spend their entire lives trying to make sense out of `free form'
languages. We should learn from the mistakes of natural language, not
embrace them!
``My name is Inigo Mantoya. You killed my language. Prepare to die.''
[w/apologies to the Princess Bride]
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