> [ English ] has also the political disadvantage that some people have it
> as their _first_ language while others have not.
>
> Thus the development of Yet Another Language. If I would be doing it (which
> I'm not) I'd use Loglan/Lojban, at least that one is a language which is
> designed to be (a) computer parseable, (b) less suitable to doublespeak
> than English...
Loglan/Lojban are very nice and interesting experiments, but not really
suitable for widespread use. They use quite a few features (based on
logic predicates, apparently) that don't exist in any natural language,
which makes them universally hard. Arguably harder than any existing
natural language, even.
> English is rather difficult to parse without hard AI, its free-form grammar
> lends itself to some rather creative uses. Granted that those are more
> common in SF novels (I particularly like Douglas Adams when it comes to
> creative usage of English ;-) than in UN documents...
That's why it's a human communication language, rather than a
programming language. Humans can speak/write creatively, and understand
it when other people do, so I really don't see any point in trying to
remove creativity (structural or otherwise) from the language, just to
make it easier for computers.
Anyway, what does this have to do with the Linux kernel? Has anyone
been crazy enough to propose that the kernel's messages should be in
Lojban and translated on the fly into English, or what?
For the record, I don't think kernel messages should be translated at
all, *in the kernel*. Internationalization is a good thing, but it
probably belongs in klogd, and using the whole English phrase as the
translation key.
-- Roger Espel Llima, espel@llaic.u-clermont1.fr http://www.eleves.ens.fr:8080/home/espel/index.html- To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-kernel" in the body of a message to majordomo@vger.rutgers.edu Please read the FAQ at http://www.tux.org/lkml/