Thanks, interesting! Not mentioned on that page, but a notable natural language which is similar in its goals is Lojban [1]. It's actually based on predicate la

Thanks, interesting! Not mentioned on that page, but a notable natural language which is similar in its goals is Lojban [1]. It's actually based on predicate language, which is actually what Inform 7 uses as well in order to derive the actual meaning from natural language sentences. It manages this because it is based on a limited subset of English. But I'll note that we humans manage to understand each other just fine without resorting to a controlled natural language. We solve the ambiguity problem basically by taking the most likely interpretation of a given sentence, given the context, or asking questions if too confused. And in fact, there are natural language parsers out there that can predict the mostly like parse reasonably well for single sentences. The biggest problem here is that programmers like having full control of what's going on, whereas this sort of idea brings in a large dose of unpredictability: how will the parser interpret this sentence? I think this can be solved to some extent by having the parser tell you what it parsed in less ambiguous terms. In fact, you might ask the parser to present a normalized version of the code that is more specific about exactly what's going on (and probably more verbose), and also expanding out phrases to show you exactly what they mean for debugging purposes. Also, when a clear parse cannot be made, the parser can simply ask you to clarify, presenting the multiple parses that it could not decide between. [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lojban http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lojban