Re: Avatox 1.0: Trouble with encoding in Windows

["Björn Persson" <spam-away@nowhere.nil>]

Jeffrey R. Carter wrote:
> Designing a language for a project is sometimes a good idea. I recall a 
> report about a class project where there was actual hardware to control 
> (I think it was a clothes washing machine). When the students tried to 
> control the hardware directly from the general-purpose language, there 
> were lots of failures. When they created a problem-specific language, 
> with statements such as Fill_Tank (Load_Size), Drain_Tank, 
> Start_Agitation, and so on, success was much more common.
> 
> Of course, these statements were really calls to a library, and the 
> program was really in the general-purpose language.

Yes, libraries are usually good.

> But I agree that one doesn't want to design and implement a language for 
> each project. Just for each language.

So you want to design one programming language for each human language? 
How many would there be? This Wikipedia article says the draft ISO 639-3 
has 7602 language codes:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISO_639-3

This page lists 7618 codes:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_ISO_639-3_codes

That's going to keep you occupied for a while. But maybe you were 
planning to discriminate against all the small languages, and only 
provide programming languages to those with more than some arbitrarily 
chosen number of speakers? Here's a list of some 250 languages with more 
than a million native speakers:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_languages_by_number_of_native_speakers

You realize of course that you'll then have to reimplement a whole lot 
of libraries in each of these new languages. And debug them. Seven 
thousand times over (or 250 of whatever). Then, whenever a bug is found 
or an improvement is made in a library, the same change will have to be 
made in all the other incarnations too.

If you think that sounds like a good way to spend your time, go ahead. 
Me, I'm going to stick to code reuse.

-- 
Bj�rn Persson                              PGP key A88682FD
                    omb jor ers @sv ge.
                    r o.b n.p son eri nu