🚀 go-pugleaf

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

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