[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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