Re: Announcing new scripting/prototyping language

["Richard Riehle" <adaworks@earthlink.net>]

"Georg Bauhaus" <sb463ba@l1-hrz.uni-duisburg.de> wrote in message
news:c00cof$lrv$2@a1-hrz.uni-duisburg.de...
>
> Possible...  "readable", then "easy to read", then "possible
> to read". Some of Chinese ideographic content is easy to remember if
> you learn to distinguish the pictures.  Doesn't mean that Chinese
> writing is easy to understand, e.g. because of context dependence.
> Now what does "read" mean?
>

Actually, there is a system to Chinese characters.  While it is true that
the meaning of some characters is lost even to many educated Chinese,
that is no different than the use of some obscure word
on some English readers.   Consider the word, omphaloskepsis.  A native
speaker of Greek will get a sense of the meaning of the word, but may
not know how it is used in English.

Chinese characters are made up of a small set of elementary [brush]
strokes.   These are combined into a comprehensible set (about 300)
of radicals.   The radicals, in turn, are used to compose the more
complicated characters.   In some ways, written Chinese is more
object-oriented languages built over a discrete alphabet.

To read a newspaper in Chinese, one needs to know about 1800 to
2000 characters.   This is well within the range of the vocabulary of
people using languages built over an alphabet.   An educated Chinese
will know a lot more than 2000 characters.

As to readability of C versus other languages, my experience, in the
classroom, is that students shown a long program in C and the same
program in Ada, will nearly always find the Ada program easier to
read when they have never seen either language before.

Richard Riehle