From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 X-Spam-Checker-Version: SpamAssassin 3.4.4 (2020-01-24) on polar.synack.me X-Spam-Level: X-Spam-Status: No, score=-1.3 required=5.0 tests=BAYES_00,INVALID_MSGID autolearn=no autolearn_force=no version=3.4.4 X-Google-Language: ENGLISH,ASCII-7-bit X-Google-Thread: 103376,1dc0d0f1c69afb5a X-Google-Attributes: gid103376,public From: Richard Riehle Subject: Re: polymophism Date: 1996/11/25 Message-ID: #1/1 X-Deja-AN: 200707119 references: <56q99a$5o3@rc1.vub.ac.be> <56skhq$9cg@hacgate2.hac.com> <570f4b$rbu@queeg.apci.net> <329493AD.4A35@gsfc.nasa.gov> <32957EB9.17AF@kafka.informatik.uni-stuttgart.de> content-type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII organization: National University, San Diego mime-version: 1.0 newsgroups: comp.lang.ada Date: 1996-11-25T00:00:00+00:00 List-Id: On Fri, 22 Nov 1996, Klaus Brouwer wrote: in response to the following, > > Note I don't want to get into the fruitless religious war over whether > > > > The_object.Do_something (now); > > > > or > > > > Do_Something (The_Object, Now) > > > > is better. you said, > Would be better, since > > [The_Object do_someting:now] > > is best. which leads me to wonder if you think Russian is a better language than Chinese because the grammar and syntax of Russian more closely follows your preference in programming syntax? These arguments about syntax are generally pretty much nonsense since there is no such thing as a "natural" order in language. There is simply the order we have learned in our native language and the biases inherent in having no knowledge of a radically different language. This cultural bias shows up all the time by evaluating programming languages according to syntactic features while ignoring the importance of expressibility. The phenomenom is not new. It manifests itself as an inhibitor in students trying to learn the spoken language of another culture when they continually look for similarities to the language they already know. Richard Riehle