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It’s no wonder. English isn’t known for its expressiveness. That’s one of the many reasons why it’s commonly used in the tech industry for defining reserved key
by guessmyname 3y ago
It’s no wonder. English isn’t known for its expressiveness. That’s one of the many reasons why it’s commonly used in the tech industry for defining reserved keywords in programming languages; its simplicity compared to other languages makes it ideal for that purpose.
- Justsignedup 3y agoisn't english one of the most expressive languages out there...? has an explicit word for most concepts. its just a bit fuzzy on the top 2000 words.
- eddd-ddde 3y agoI don't think so. To begin with, you have no real grammar modes or inflection. Also lots of concepts are merged into shared words. Some examples: Some languages have two verbs for the state of being, "ser", "estar" which mean different things, you can be cold, or you can _be_ cold. The key example from before. English relies heavily on explicitness which makes it less expressive (less context per word), you cant just say "ate" you need to say "they ate".
- qsort 3y agoCitation needed? English has one of the largest vocabularies of any language (depends on how you measure, what counts as a word is a complicated question...) and it's just as expressive as anything else. It's used in tech because it's the default language and it's spoken by the default country, not because of any metaphisical property of the language itself... Tokens in the concrete syntax of formal languages are just placeholders, you could use arbitrary symbols instead and the abstract syntax wouldn't change.