4 ms·

The Internet is an easy target for blame, but in fact in the past month I found a number of people whose thinking (at least on some specific topic) was near to

by stew-j 4y ago

The Internet is an easy target for blame, but in fact in the past month I found a number of people whose thinking (at least on some specific topic) was near to mine through Reddit discussions (and now you, it seems): https://www.github.com/kaveh808 https://www.github.com/kaveh808 https://gitlab.com/flatwhatson/guile-prescheme https://gitlab.com/flatwhatson/guile-prescheme If you are interested in the nature of machine code and assembly language I would recommend at least looking at Scheme86: https://dspace.mit.edu/handle/1721.1/6042 https://dspace.mit.edu/handle/1721.1/6042 It's like a Scheme interpreter running on hardware, and the latest successor to Steele/Sussman's Scheme-on-a-chip--I'm working on microcoding it with my inferior S-assembly. :) I didn't think you were being insulting--my last refuge in an increasingly humorless world appears to be self-deprecating humor. Have you reached out to John Cowan, who is working on the R7RS Large Scheme standard, and is interested in topics like auxiliary human language as well as computer language and their representation? I'm not serious enough, I'm afraid, for the Scheme community (see above)--but they might take you more seriously: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_W._Cowan https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_W._Cowan Another Scheme person, Jonathan Rees, was (or still may be) at a forward-thinking institute called "Ronin Institute"--I'm not sure what their process is for onboarding scholars but they might be interested in your work: https://ronininstitute.org https://ronininstitute.org Elmer Hanks wrote a forward thinking book many years ago called "Enterprises of Great Pith and Moment: A Proposal for a Universal Human Language" (my Shakespeare quote), about his machine readable, sign-language friendly, auxiliary language, and is worth a look in your domain of study. I have been meaning to re-install Whitaker's Words which I used frequently in my own study of Latin, but lost when I upgraded my OS. You might have heard of Ido, an auxiliary language designed by Louis Couturat, a French logician, and the successor to Esperanto. It's almost completely regular, and I thought it might be a start for a more human-language neutral Scheme implementation (it is a Eurocentric language, so not completely neutral, unfortunately). My middle-school English teacher in 1981 pointed at the Esperanto booth in the language arts faire we took a field trip to and said, "I don't know why that booth is always so disappointingly unattended." I guess "ain't much changed", right? I recommend "Asimov's Guide to Shakespeare" if you haven't read it: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asimov%27s_Guide_to_Shakespeare https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asimov%27s_Guide_to_Shakespear... and maybe we should both just continue to choose "to be" rather than "not to be". [edit] I was talking this over with my wife, and after reading your links, I still don't completely understand the overall advantage of coding word stems rather than characters. It did remind me of the first computer I owned, a Sinclair ZX-81 I built from a kit. Its Basic keywords, FOR, GOSUB, RETURN were each represented as a bytecode--and I think you could enter with a special key modifier with one key-chord. Is this like what you are saying?

verisimilitudes 4y ago
I'm aware of the Scheme chips. I chose machine language because it doesn't need many names for code, and thus was suitable as a starting point for my work on textless programming. I've not reached out to John Cowan but think I might, despite my dislike of Unicode. I'll also look into this Ronin Institute. I'll keep the book in mind. I appreciate the help. As I explain in the last linked article, a lot of these artificial languages retard language work, rather than help it. I expect to target real languages with most of my time now. Think of Elision like MIDI, but for human language. Text is stored uniformly as indices into a dictionary, rather than as a sequence of characters with interspersed control codes.
- stew-j 4y ago
  Thank you for a civil, intelligent conversation. I had never thought about the "asymmetry" of putting control codes with the character codes in ASCII--it does seem illogical now that you point it out. :) Languages like Ido aren't completely "artificial", and I certainly think Couturat didn't fail in some sense--my irrational issue with Ido, despite its numerous strengths, is that words with the same part of speech end in the same letter(s), making it monotonous. But as my wife pointed out, that regularity makes it easier for computers to parse.
  - CRConrad 4y ago
    > my irrational issue with Ido, despite its numerous strengths, is that words with the same part of speech end in the same letter(s), making it monotonous. But as my wife pointed out, that regularity makes it easier for computers to parse. For people too. And isn't that exactly how many natural languages work? Verbs -- someone doeS something -- all end with an 's'[1] in English: He/she/it writes, reads, encodes, builds, blathers, creates, excels, triumphs, loses, sucks... ___ [1]: Admittedly only in the present tense third-person singular, but that's something. Arguably, more of that would make the language easier to parse and learn.
  - verisimilitudes 4y ago
    It's no issue. > I had never thought about the "asymmetry" of putting control codes with the character codes in ASCII--it does seem illogical now that you point it out. Yes, this is why I call them insidious. The issue with constructed languages is that they simply don't have the beauty of something such as Latin, and never can, due to their very nature. Anyway, feel free to send me an e-mail at some point, if we're to continue our discussion at some later time.

by stew-j 4y ago

verisimilitudes 4y ago

I'm aware of the Scheme chips. I chose machine language because it doesn't need many names for code, and thus was suitable as a starting point for my work on textless programming. I've not reached out to John Cowan but think I might, despite my dislike of Unicode. I'll also look into this Ronin Institute. I'll keep the book in mind. I appreciate the help. As I explain in the last linked article, a lot of these artificial languages retard language work, rather than help it. I expect to target real languages with most of my time now. Think of Elision like MIDI, but for human language. Text is stored uniformly as indices into a dictionary, rather than as a sequence of characters with interspersed control codes.

stew-j 4y ago
Thank you for a civil, intelligent conversation. I had never thought about the "asymmetry" of putting control codes with the character codes in ASCII--it does seem illogical now that you point it out. :) Languages like Ido aren't completely "artificial", and I certainly think Couturat didn't fail in some sense--my irrational issue with Ido, despite its numerous strengths, is that words with the same part of speech end in the same letter(s), making it monotonous. But as my wife pointed out, that regularity makes it easier for computers to parse.
- CRConrad 4y ago
  > my irrational issue with Ido, despite its numerous strengths, is that words with the same part of speech end in the same letter(s), making it monotonous. But as my wife pointed out, that regularity makes it easier for computers to parse. For people too. And isn't that exactly how many natural languages work? Verbs -- someone doeS something -- all end with an 's'[1] in English: He/she/it writes, reads, encodes, builds, blathers, creates, excels, triumphs, loses, sucks... ___ [1]: Admittedly only in the present tense third-person singular, but that's something. Arguably, more of that would make the language easier to parse and learn.
- verisimilitudes 4y ago
  It's no issue. > I had never thought about the "asymmetry" of putting control codes with the character codes in ASCII--it does seem illogical now that you point it out. Yes, this is why I call them insidious. The issue with constructed languages is that they simply don't have the beauty of something such as Latin, and never can, due to their very nature. Anyway, feel free to send me an e-mail at some point, if we're to continue our discussion at some later time.