'Naturally' is almost always a red herring in programming language design, because what is 'natural' tends to be 'whatever I was previously familiar with'. Ther

'Naturally' is almost always a red herring in programming language design, because what is 'natural' tends to be 'whatever I was previously familiar with'. There are a lot of unstated assumptions here: · That what's best for natural language is also the best for programming languages. This is still a debated topic, but my personal feeling is that the two are different enough in both mechanism and purpose that what's good for one isn't necessarily good for the other. (For an illustrative example, look at how sigils worked in Perl 5, as they were explicitly designed to work like English demonstrative words like "that" or "these", and many programmers when first exposured to Perl feel like they were 'illogical'. They weren't, but in this case, mirroring a natural-language convention tended to obscure, rather than clarify, what was going on in the language!) · That phrase ordering in English is necessarily 'natural'. Lots of naturally-occurring spoken languages feature word order that differs tremendously from English! · That the English-language phrase you're describing as 'unnatural' is in fact unnatural: it's actually a common convention, especially when you're introducing a new fact to a conversation! "Tiger Woods, a famous golfer, adopted a cat."