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Go has 25 keywords. C has 32. Famously verbose Visual Basic has over 200. English has 1-2 million.

• xigoi 1y ago
  I’d only count closed-class words as keywords. Open-class words, which comprise the vast majority of the dictionary, are more like a standard library.
  • emseetech 1y ago
    You can't communicate at all with only closed class words. You can write fully capable programs with only built-in keywords though, so I wouldn't make that comparison.
    • flir 1y ago
      Not sure a keyword only C program can communicate, either. printf isn't a keyword...
      • deleted 1y ago
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      • emseetech 1y ago
        It won’t be portable or a good idea but you can use os/hardware specific directives. But this is drifting. The point of it all is that the ambiguity of programming languages are already high despite all our best efforts. The ambiguity of natural language is many orders of magnitude worse. Which is great for poetry but we’re not writing poetry.
  • deleted 1y ago
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