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Perl is so cool from a linguistic standpoint. I wish there were more written about that aspect of it. Also Conway is amazing.
by totalperspectiv 7y ago
Perl is so cool from a linguistic standpoint. I wish there were more written about that aspect of it. Also Conway is amazing.
- aasasd 7y agoI mean: > While in graduate school at the University of California, Berkeley, Larry Wall and his wife were studying linguistics with the intention of finding an unwritten language, perhaps in Africa, and creating a writing system for it. They would then use this new writing system to translate various texts into the language, among them the Bible. And Perl was explicitly designed with a slant towards natural-language traits. Wall has said that he didn't know as much about creating programming languages, and that this likely affected Perl. So he might've written about the linguistic aspects instead. > Wall's training as a linguist is apparent in his books, interviews, and lectures. He often compares Perl to a natural language and explains his decisions in Perl's design with linguistic rationale. He also often uses linguistic terms for Perl language constructs, so instead of traditional terms such as "variable", "function", and "accessor" he sometimes says "noun", "verb", and "topicalizer".
- empath75 7y agoFor a linguist, he made a horrifically unreadable language.