Re: AWS Coding Styles (and about boring plain-linear text files in the end)

["Dmitry A. Kazakov" <mailbox@dmitry-kazakov.de>]

On Wed, 19 Jan 2011 22:43:33 +0100, Yannick Duch�ne (Hibou57) wrote:

> The natural language is known to be redundant and these redundancies vary.

Yes. So are most of artificial languages too. To put it simple: a random
sequence of ASCII characters is not a legal program. A random sequence of
phonemes is not a speech.

> The second example is about to be implicit. There is a more or less  
> constant context in natural language,

Right, and artificial languages are no different either. You always have a
context, scope, state you implicitly refer to. There is just no other way
to have it. The context = the internal state of the reader, be it you, me
Ada compiler or Martians.

> With a language like Ada (or Lisp, or Python or whatever), while very  
> nice, none of the above applies: an error is an error and there is nothing  
> which gonna make it somewhat obvious to your eyes.

You are confusing here sematic errors and language errors [syntax, grammar
etc].

   "The gostak distims the doshes"
   "Colorless green ideas sleep furiously"

are famous examples of syntactically correct meaningless sentences. Is here
something helping you to do something with them?

   declare
      type Four is range 1..4:
      X : Four := 45.7; -- You well know what is wrong here
   begin
      ...

> Now, what checks did you applied while reading me ? What implicit truths  
> did you had in mind for you inferences and understanding ? And above all,  
> how did you interpreted this in the whole ? You see ? ;) Would be funny to  
> see, but we may even never ever see. If you did not interpreted this the  
> way I wanted to mean it, you will not crash, I will not crash, and we will  
> probably recover (may not be consciously), re-sync in many ways, and many  
> other funny behaviors. That's just a third example of the difference  
> between this kind of natural language and formal languages.

This is a false analogy. Human brain is not a program, it is a processor.
Nothing wrong happens with your computer if you feed it with an illegal Ada
program. It is accepted or rejected in some way. So does the human brain,
you have a choice to accept (understand, agree) or not, maybe mistakenly or
rightfully. No difference whatsoever.

-- 
Regards,
Dmitry A. Kazakov
http://www.dmitry-kazakov.de