Re: Saskrit as computer programming language?
Great Parayan
newsgrou...@yahoo.com (Prudence) wrote in message news:<461a8fe9.0406...@posting.google.com>...
> I have heard this now many times, that Sanskrit is the most ideal for
> a programming language, it being a very strctuctured language.
>
> I could never understand the logic behind this. Every programming
> language has its own structure and syntax, it does not follow the
> structure of the language it is typed in. And thinking about it, is C
> written in English? I don't think. Perl, may be. OTOH, I think coding
> in Sanskirt will will only get you a lot of typos.
>
> Say printf() is mudrA() or is it mudra(). I am sure I am only seeing
> specifics and am missing the real picture.
>
> Can someone explain the whole concept to this novice?
CBFalconer
>
> Crossposting for better analysis and responses...
while failing to set follow-ups to a single group, thus causing
the entire matter to be ignored.
--
A: Because it fouls the order in which people normally read text.
Q: Why is top-posting such a bad thing?
A: Top-posting.
Q: What is the most annoying thing on usenet and in e-mail?
Anton van Straaten
The idea of Sanskrit as programming language seems to stem from NASA
researcher Rick Briggs' 1985 paper, "Knowledge Representation in Sanskrit
and Artificial Intelligence," AI Magazine Vol 6, #1, 1985.
Briggs proposed Sanskrit as a good language for AI-style knowledge
representation, i.e. for machine representation of knowledge expressed in a
structured form, based on natural language. Sanskrit is apparently
well-suited to this application, partly because of its systematized grammar,
and its relative lack of ambiguity. Briggs pointed out correspondences
between KR structures used in AI, and equivalent structures in Sanskrit. At
least a couple of conferences arose as a result of this paper.
However, it's a big leap to say that Sanskrit is ideal for a programming
language (perhaps depending on your definition of programming language).
No-one seems to have proposed Sanskrit-as-programming-language as seriously
as Briggs proposed Sanskrit-as-KR-language.
There's a recent post at http://www.a42.com/node/view/173 entitled "Sanskrit
as an Object-Oriented Language", which quotes a GoodNewsIndia.com article
that describes parallels between OO class structures and the structure of
Sanskrit. However, it's not actually proposing Sanskrit as a programming
language. There are numerous other articles which suggest, for example,
Sanskrit as "a possible computer language"[1] or "the potential uses of
Sanskrit as a machine language"[2], but these all seem to be references to
Briggs' work.
Anton
[1] http://www.rediff.com/search/2003/jul/24sanskrit.htm
[2] http://www.amritapuri.org/education/sanskrit/artintell.htm
edens morgan mair fheal greykitten tomys des anges
"Anton van Straaten" <ant...@acm.org> wrote:
> "Great Parayan" <par...@blackplanet.com> wrote:
>
> > Crossposting for better analysis and responses...
Newsgroups: alt.folklore.computers, alt.sci.physics.new-theories,
comp.lang.scheme, talk.bizarre, comp.programming
what is it about injuns and talk-bizarre?
wanna get chased off again?
> Briggs proposed Sanskrit as a good language for AI-style knowledge
> representation, i.e. for machine representation of knowledge expressed in a
> structured form, based on natural language. Sanskrit is apparently
> well-suited to this application, partly because of its systematized grammar,
> and its relative lack of ambiguity. Briggs pointed out correspondences
> between KR structures used in AI, and equivalent structures in Sanskrit. At
> least a couple of conferences arose as a result of this paper.
ambiguity and complexity are not errors in natural languages but features
allowing commonly expressed concepts to be expressed qucikly and redundantly
whilst also allowing fallback parsing to less commonly expressed concpets
it also helps that the human brain doesnt disappear in a poof of logic
when faced with an inconsistency in its productions
if sanskrit inherently less ambiguous and complex than any other natural language
odds on favorite is that it aint a natural language
was sanskrit ever used a native language
learned through normal childhood language acquistion
and used from childhood through death for all productions in life
and than passed on to the next generation
through normal childhood language acquistion
without formal instruction
and thus acquiring phonetic and syntactic drift with time
along new word formation and semantic drift of existing stems?
if not than its not a natural language
if its not a natural language then the weak church-turing thesis kicks in
and it can be assumed that sanksrit is a type 0 language
and mechanically translatable iinto any other type 0 language
like fortran or prolog or lisp or irc-speak
now go away
John Savard
tomys des anges <mair_...@yahoo.com> wrote, in part:
>was sanskrit ever used a native language
>learned through normal childhood language acquistion
>and used from childhood through death for all productions in life
>and than passed on to the next generation
>through normal childhood language acquistion
>without formal instruction
>and thus acquiring phonetic and syntactic drift with time
>along new word formation and semantic drift of existing stems?
Yes.
Just as Latin was.
Today, the descendants of those who spoke Latin speak Italian... and
the descendants of those who spoke Sanskrit speak Hindustani.
John Savard
http://home.ecn.ab.ca/~jsavard/index.html
Anton van Straaten
> if sanskrit inherently less ambiguous and complex than any other
> natural language odds on favorite is that it aint a natural language
"Less complex" was not claimed. Sanskrit is certainly a natural language.
However, one of the things which makes it unique is that around 600 BCE, the
grammarian Panini completed a thorough systematization of the grammar of
Sanskrit:
"Panini's grammar consists of nearly 4,000 rules divided into eight
chapters. It provides a collection of 2,000 roots. Being composed with the
maximum conceivable brevity, this grammar describes the entire Sanskrit
language in all the details of its structure, with a unity which has never
been equalled elsewhere. It is at once the shortest and fullest grammar in
the world." [1]
An interesting point about Panini's grammar is that it "is notably
descriptive; it does not attempt to tell people how they should speak and
write; Panini was only concerned with what people actually did say and
write." [2] This underscores the point about Sanskrit as a natural
language.
However, Panini's rules were a great influence on the subsequent use of
Sanskrit, which remained a much more stable language because of the rules.
George G. Joseph discusses this in his book, "The Crest of the Peacock: The
Non-European Roots of Mathematics":
"[Sanskrit's] potential for scientific use was greatly enhanced as a
result of the thorough systemisation of its grammar by Panini. ... On the
basis of just under 4000 sutras [rules expressed as aphorisms], he built
virtually the whole structure of the Sanskrit language, whose general
'shape' hardly changed for the next two thousand years." -- as quoted in
[3].
In order to create the grammar, Panini "invented a notation which is
equivalent in its power to that of Backus [BNF], and has many similar
properties: given the use to which the notation was put, it is possible to
identify structures equivalent to the Backus '|' and to the use of the
meta-brackets '<' and '>' enclosing suggestive names. Panini avoided the
necessity for the character '::=' by writing the meta-result on the right
rather than the left." [4]
"Panini uses metarules, transformations, and recursion in such
sophistication that his grammar has the computing power equivalent to a
Turing machine. In this sense Panini may be considered the father of
computing machines." [2]
Joseph argued that "An indirect consequence of Panini's efforts to increase
the linguistic facility of Sanskrit soon became apparent in the character of
scientific and mathematical literature," i.e. that the flourishing of Indian
mathematics may have been a direct consequence of the systematization of the
grammar of Sanskrit, and of the formal tools which were developed in order
to do this.
So, it turns out that Sanskrit is on-topic in more of the crossposted groups
than might at first be imagined. I'll close with linguist Frits Staal:
"We can now assert, with the power of hindsight, that Indian linguists in
the fifth century B.C. knew and understood more than Western linguists in
the nineteenth century A.D. Can one not extend this conclusion and claim
that it is probable that Indian linguists are still ahead of their Western
colleagues and may continue to be so in the next century? Quite possible;
all we can say is that it is difficult to detect something that we have not
already discovered ourselves." (as quoted in [5])
Anton
[1] http://evans-experientialism.freewebspace.com/panininix.htm
[2] http://encyclopedia.thefreedictionary.com/Panini
[3] http://www-gap.dcs.st-and.ac.uk/~history/Mathematicians/Panini.html
[4] http://www.infinityfoundation.com/mandala/t_es/t_es_rao-t_syntax.htm
[5] Panini's Grammar and Computer Science,
http://www.ece.lsu.edu/kak/bhate.pdf
edens morgan mair fheal greykitten tomys des anges
> However, one of the things which makes it unique is that around 600 BCE, the
> grammarian Panini completed a thorough systematization of the grammar of
> Sanskrit:
youre still ignoring equivalence issues
if sanskrit is to be regarded as natural language
the linguistics assumption is that the refutation of whorf-sapir
such that all natural languages are equally complex
and can express the same concepts
so that if you can completely describe one with a type 0 grammar
than you can describe all natural languages with a type 0 grammar
and the only issue is devising the actual mechanical translation
from language to language
so that if sanskrit is a good kr language so too is basque or mandarin or english
if you claim sanskrit is inherently different
less complex or ambiguous
you then run into weaker forms of church-turing
that would posit sanskrit is no different than say prolog
and the only issue again is devising the mechanical translation
youre like someone claiming that 1966 lisp is superior to 1966 fortran
because fortrean didnt support recursion adn lisp did
in fact any program in one language can be mechanically translated
into the other
there is only proven escape from the chomsky hierarchy
are monte carlo methods
it really wouldnt bother me to discover human brains use monte carlo programs
but from a computer i want consistency and predictablility
now how is any of this any relevant to bizarreness
Anton van Straaten
wrote
> [Anton van Straaten wrote:]
> > "Less complex" was not claimed. Sanskrit is certainly a natural
language.
> > However, one of the things which makes it unique is that around 600 BCE,
the
> > grammarian Panini completed a thorough systematization of the grammar of
> > Sanskrit:
>
> youre still ignoring equivalence issues
...
> now how is any of this any relevant to bizarreness
You seem to be arguing with someone other than me. Perhaps you're arguing
with Rick Briggs, or perhaps even Panini. Talk.bizarre certainly seems like
a good place for such a discussion.
Anton
Björn Lindström
> "Panini's grammar consists of nearly 4,000 rules divided into eight
> chapters. It provides a collection of 2,000 roots. Being composed with the
> maximum conceivable brevity, this grammar describes the entire Sanskrit
> language in all the details of its structure, with a unity which has never
> been equalled elsewhere. It is at once the shortest and fullest grammar in
> the world." [1]
That would indicate that he didn't systematised the whole language. A
natural language is a lot more complex than that.
There is no reason to believe that Sanskrit was any simpler than other
natural languages. We just don't know all of it.
Edward G. Nilges
Perhaps the appeal of Sanskrit is that it is a dead and therefore
static language, and in principle and for this reason fully
formalizable.
But by this logic, computer programmers employed by The Vatican would
program in Latin.
I do not know whether Sanskrit is suitable for programming. However, a
rather thoughtless comment long ago in American programming circles
was "I'm not going to maintain this code. It was written in Sanskrit."
The comment managed to express both anti-intellectualism and
ethnocentricity and was paradoxical in that many programmers learned
computer languages in part to join in fact a protected community of
court eunuchs who would be able to exclude others based on this
mastery. Their response to a different form of their own gesture
exposed the ultimate futility of the gesture and indeed the way it
sets man against man.
Needless to say, such comments as "dis code is in Sanskrit" in our
globalized world are no longer Politically Correct. They are also
profoundly offensive given India's strengths in software development.
Yet in the 1970s you'd hear them, ironically, from University of
Chicago types, perhaps trained by the Leo Strauss cabal, now in
control in DC, to think ethnocentrism was somehow urbane.
Such comments were often made about code with "too much" elegance, in
an American-Puritan spirit which (as H. L. Mencken and Edmund Wilson
observed) resists elegance and confuses practicality with ugliness.
But should the noble language of the Bhagavad Gita express the needs
of mere science and trade? The Prince does not concern himself with
these matters.
Nimmi Srivastav
As someone who has studied Sanskrit up to middle school, I can say
that Sanskrit is not a very easy language to master (note that the
word used is master and not learn). What especially got on my nerves
was this thing called "sandhee-viched", the ability to coin new words
on the fly. In my experience, sometimes these "new" words tended to
have context-dependent meanings. In my opinion, a constrained
version of the Sanskrit grammar may be more suitable as a computer
language.
--Nimmi
Harold Rabbie
Especially in some of the more sophisticated graphical editors, the need to
come up with a unique bitmap image for each function button seems to have
rapidly outgrown the imaginations of the GUI designers.
In multilingual environments like Europe, this disease has even spread to
consumer appliances such as washing machines and remote controls. In order
to avoid having to label each function in eighteen languages, each European
manufacturer has adopted its own idiosyncratic set of symbols, equally
unintelligible to all.
To solve this problem once and for all, I propose worldwide adoption of a
set of universal icons that a) are mostly unambiguous, b) are already
recognized and understood by billions of people, and c) have a well-defined
Unicode representation. I refer of course to Chinese characters, which can
visually represent concepts with a much higher information content per pixel
than any representation based on alphabets such as Latin (or Sanskrit).
Is there any chance that the Anglo-centric technology industry can be
persuaded to adopt this or a similar idea?
Harold
Brian Boutel
That feature sounds just like lots of programming languages, where you
can declare new names almost anywhere, even with context-dependent
meanings - the same name can have a different meaning in different scopes.
--brian
--
Brian Boutel
Wellington New Zealand
Note the NOSPAM
Ray Dillinger
> To solve this problem once and for all, I propose worldwide adoption of a
> set of universal icons that a) are mostly unambiguous, b) are already
> recognized and understood by billions of people, and c) have a well-defined
> Unicode representation. I refer of course to Chinese characters, which can
> visually represent concepts with a much higher information content per pixel
> than any representation based on alphabets such as Latin (or Sanskrit).
>
> Is there any chance that the Anglo-centric technology industry can be
> persuaded to adopt this or a similar idea?
None whatsoever. We are more likely to _reinvent_ a
pictographic writing system as "mediaglyphics" or
whatever, than we are to adopt the existing chinese
system. It runs deeper than NIH; the chinese characters
are widely percieved as cryptic because to a non-chinese
mind there is no obvious rule for associating a sinogram
with its pronunciation or a sequence of sinograms with its
denotation.
We have fundamentally different concept maps. Words that
give a name to types of physical things are universal,
though not all concept maps make the same distinctions
between them. But words that name anything more subtle
than that - directions, actions, moods, ideas, emotions,
motivations, etc.... these are outside the range of
pictorial representation. Any symbol for them in a
pictographic language relies on their associations
with physical objects, and those associations are far
from universal.
If an english speaker were making up a pictographic
language of icons, I can guarantee it would be much
easier for english speakers to learn than sinograms,
because we don't have the conceptual and cultural structures
for associating sinograms with their meanings that have been
culturally imparted to the chinese. But the chinese would
find it horrible, unintuitive, and cryptic, much as we find
the sinograms, because it would be relying on concept maps
that they don't share with us.
In english, and most alphabetic languages, we have
phonetic pronunciation rules (many of them, and in english
they conflict a lot, but we get 90% accuracy even so) to
"sound out" an unfamiliar sequence of characters and find
what word (sound) it connects us to. We also get word
morphology so we can recognize roots and affixes in letter
substrings or sound subsequences and, often, figure out
the meanings of even unfamiliar words. In english in
particular, a word's spelling often tells us what language
it was stolen from. We use this information to connect us
to different sections of a bunch of different concept maps;
the germans for example didn't think like the romans, and
an english word from german roots will access a slightly
different part of our concept map than an english word
from latin roots. Thus the same concept may be expressed
with the cultural overtones of approval or disapproval or
rules of construction that it had in any of the cultures
we've stolen a word for that concept from.
But this is just another way of saying we have internalized
the knowledge to use it, in the same way that others have
internalized the knowledge to use chinese.
Sinograms, as a writing system shared by a family of mutually
incomprehensible dialects, offer no help in phonetic
pronunciation; you either know the character or you don't.
While this is an advantage for its purpose as a common
representation of different languages, it deprives those
accustomed to alphabetic languages of a facility we find
important and depend on heavily.
And while the heavily idiomatic use of sequences of sinograms
to represent other ideas may give morphology benefits to
people raised with it, it flies in the face of what people
raised with other cultures and languages (other concept maps)
would consider to be intuitive connections.
For example, even if I recognized the characters for "sun" and
"root" I probably wouldn't have any rule or intuitive connection
in my head that would lead me to think of a compass direction if
I saw them juxtaposed. I don't think of east as the origin point
of the sun, I think of east as the direction of Earth's rotation.
And I use "root" as an origin-point concept only in referring to
things that change and grow, which the sun does not. The
juxtaposition makes no sense to me as morphology, because I
wasn't raised with this set of chinese maps for representation.
Because humans always believe that their internal prejudices
and concept maps are universal, everybody thinks they can make
up a limited set of icons that will be "obvious" in having
representational pictograms and create a "universal language."
The efforts always fail because none of them understand that
such a language will depend utterly on their own internalized
concept maps and will therefore be exactly as complex,
arbitrary, and cryptic to others as chinese writing is to
them, for exactly the same reasons.
The chinese attempted a universal language of icons centuries
ago; what they developed is incomprehensible to people whose
concept maps don't match it. The same is necessarily true
of any iconic (ideogram) language that expresses concepts
more complicated than concrete nouns.
There is a lesson somewhere in all of this.
Bear
CBFalconer
>
... much snipped garbage ...
That troll Eddie has sneaked in here on a.f.c with his
nilgewater. This requires plonking the entire thread. He has
already made life on c.p a living hell.
--
Chuck F (cbfal...@yahoo.com) (cbfal...@worldnet.att.net)
Available for consulting/temporary embedded and systems.
<http://cbfalconer.home.att.net> USE worldnet address!
EventHelix.com
see how it would solve the problem. I guess the solution is to have detailed
icons.
Another option is to provide country specific stickers.
Sandeep
--
http://www.EventHelix.com/EventStudio
EventStudio 2.0 - Distributed System Design CASE Tool
Toby Thain
> Harold Rabbie wrote:
>
> > To solve this problem once and for all, I propose worldwide adoption of a
> > visually represent concepts with a much higher information content per pixel
> > than any representation based on alphabets such as Latin (or Sanskrit).
> >
> > Is there any chance that the Anglo-centric technology industry can be
> > persuaded to adopt this or a similar idea?
>
>
> The chinese attempted a universal language of icons centuries
> ago; what they developed is incomprehensible to people whose
> concept maps don't match it. The same is necessarily true
> of any iconic (ideogram) language that expresses concepts
> more complicated than concrete nouns.
>
> There is a lesson somewhere in all of this.
The subject was exhaustively addressed in H.M. McLuhan's "The
Gutenberg Galaxy: The Making of Typographic Man", which I heartily
recommend:
\\
... printing ideograms is totally different from typography based on
the phonetic alphabet. For the ideograph even more than the hieroglyph
is a complex /Gestalt/ involving all of the senses at once. The
ideogram affords none of the separation and specialization of sense,
none of the breaking apart of sight and sound and meaning which is the
key to the phonetic alphabet. So that the numerous specializations and
separations of function inherent in industry and applied knowledge
simply were not accessible to the Chinese. Today they appear to be
proceeding along the lines of the phonetics alphabet. This ensures
that they will liquidate their present and traditional culture /in
toto/.
... The invention of the alphabet, like the invention of the wheel,
was the translation or reduction of a complex, organic interplay of
spaces into a single space. The phonetic alphabet reduced the use of
all the senses at once, which is oral speech, to a merely visual code.
//
Toby
>
>
>
> Bear
Toby Thain
Languages descended from the same source as Sanskrit are far more
widespread; according to research they include such surprising
disparates as Thai, German, and Chinese, as well as Latin.
See: "DISCOVERY OF DRAVIDIAN AS THE COMMON SOURCE OF INDO-EUROPEAN",
V. Keerthi Kumar (1999), http://www.datanumeric.com/dravidian/
\\ ... it is by a backward coursing, by comparing the different
developments in the various branches of Indo-European, and by
identifying family likeness, and regular shifting of sounds that the
scholars have been able to determine the shape and form of ... the
root-words of Indo-European ... it is from these earliest forms that
all the millions of words in all the Indo-European languages including
Sanskrit, Slavic, Armenian, Greek, Latin, Irish, Gothic have come into
being. //
Toby
>
> John Savard
> http://home.ecn.ab.ca/~jsavard/index.html
gswork
Certain symbols do well accross cultural boundaries due to a shared
cultiral/technological history.
Signs at railway crossings are often recognisable around the world,
for instance because trains are a long standing 'fact of life' in many
many countries and have been for decades.
I'm sure various proposals are in place, or had been made in the past.
I do find some similarity between symbols on certain appliances -
washing machines, microwaves for instance, where over time the market
leader's symbolism has slowly taken precendence. Other generic
symbols (like power on/off) are long standing and tend to remain the
same (or similar) from item to item.
A symbology decided by some ISO committee is likely to prove
inadequate as new features some along on new devices more rapidly than
the committe can take on, and can you imagine the discussion in
newsgroup.washing.machine:
A Person : "how come the spin cycle goes funny when i press the wavey
button?"
The Mob : "That is a non standard symbol, take your question
elsewhere"
A person : "erm...eh?" [leaves]
the mob : [Victory is ours......!]
Alan Balmer
<hzra...@comcast.net> wrote:
>The proliferation of meaningless icons in GUIs has always frustrated me.
>Especially in some of the more sophisticated graphical editors, the need to
>come up with a unique bitmap image for each function button seems to have
>rapidly outgrown the imaginations of the GUI designers.
I've never understood the need to have an icon even when it is
meaningless - when I use Windows Explorer, for example, I always set
it to detail view, but there's no way I know to get rid of the column
of identical little icons, one for each file.
Apparently there are text people, and picture people. I can recognize
a text label much more quickly and accurately than I can figure out
what some little picture means.
--
Al Balmer
Balmer Consulting
removebalmerc...@att.net
Mel Wilson
"Harold Rabbie" <hzra...@comcast.net> wrote:
>To solve this problem once and for all, I propose worldwide adoption of a
>set of universal icons that a) are mostly unambiguous, b) are already
>recognized and understood by billions of people, and c) have a well-defined
>Unicode representation. I refer of course to Chinese characters, which can
>visually represent concepts with a much higher information content per pixel
>than any representation based on alphabets such as Latin (or Sanskrit).
And, as I've pointed out, they come now with standard
Unicode encodings, making them eminently suited to denoting
hardware operations in machine language.
>Is there any chance that the Anglo-centric technology industry can be
>persuaded to adopt this or a similar idea?
No problem. In Toronto, most of it's already happened.
Regards. Mel.
Mikko Nahkola
><hzra...@comcast.net> wrote:
>>The proliferation of meaningless icons in GUIs has always frustrated me.
>>Especially in some of the more sophisticated graphical editors, the need to
>>come up with a unique bitmap image for each function button seems to have
>>rapidly outgrown the imaginations of the GUI designers.
> I've never understood the need to have an icon even when it is
> meaningless - when I use Windows Explorer, for example, I always set
> it to detail view, but there's no way I know to get rid of the column
> of identical little icons, one for each file.
I tend to do the same thing.
However, there's something even worse than icons - thumbnails.
Earlier this year I installed a certain distribution of Linux on a
certain computer... and it defaulted to showing "preview thumbnails" for
everything it recognized. Including a bunch of RTF-format documents,
which it previewed as text ...
So, not only does the default graphical filemanager thing by default
take several minutes (well, the thing has "only" 92 Mbytes of RAM and
266 MHz to the CPU) to grind at a moderate collection of files, to
"preview" each file's contents, it does it wrong too.
Well, duh. At least it was capable of switching to a "detailed list"
kind of view.
> Apparently there are text people, and picture people. I can recognize
> a text label much more quickly and accurately than I can figure out
> what some little picture means.
I would expect to find that most of my and my wife's adult relatives are
text people too - we certainly are. Less of a pattern-matching exercise
and all that.
--
Mikko Nahkola <mnah...@trein.ntc.nokia.com>
#include <disclaimer.h>
#Not speaking for my employer. No warranty. YMMV.
Christopher C. Stacy
Brian> That feature sounds just like lots of programming languages,
Brian> where you can declare new names almost anywhere, even with
Brian> context-dependent meanings - the same name can have a
Brian> different meaning in different scopes.
Speaking of context... In Lisp, any word can mean several things,
and is understood (eg. by the compiler) only from its syntax.
(defun foo (list other-list)
(list list other-list))
The above program FOO takes two arguments, one called LIST and one
called OTHER-LIST. The programmer presumes that these arguments
will be linked list structures. The program returns a new linked list,
constructed by calling the built-in function named LIST on the arguments.
Another example that FORTRAN or C programmers might be able to
relate to better would be using the symbol "+" as a variable name,
even though it is also the name of the addition function.
(Actually, that very example is done in Lisp, but not many people
want to name their variable "+". Another example, for C++ folks,
would be allowing variables to be named "new".)
This is different from (eg. infix) programming languages that base
their syntax on reserved words. In Lisp, the syntax is more explicit,
so the programmer has more freedom of expression in naming things.
You have to be careful not to name things in a confusing way,
but the FOO example above is more clearly understandable than
if I had named the first argument "L" or "LST" or something.
Joe Marshall
> To solve this problem once and for all, I propose worldwide adoption
> of [...] Chinese characters...
>
> Is there any chance that the Anglo-centric technology industry can be
> persuaded to adopt this or a similar idea?
None whatsoever.
Scott Dorsey
>In article <FAbxc.2319$0y.1101@attbi_s03>,
>"Harold Rabbie" <hzra...@comcast.net> wrote:
>>To solve this problem once and for all, I propose worldwide adoption of a
>>set of universal icons that a) are mostly unambiguous, b) are already
>>recognized and understood by billions of people, and c) have a well-defined
>>Unicode representation. I refer of course to Chinese characters, which can
>>visually represent concepts with a much higher information content per pixel
>>than any representation based on alphabets such as Latin (or Sanskrit).
>
> And, as I've pointed out, they come now with standard
>Unicode encodings, making them eminently suited to denoting
>hardware operations in machine language.
Well, that is traditional already. A lot of machines used to use the ascii
(or local display code) value for A as the top byte for the add instruction,
the code for S as subtract, and so forth. Of course, that was in the days
when human beings would often have to read or write machine code, even if only
to decipher coredumps. Today you never see such things in this age of higher
abstraction so the need for comprehensible opcodes is greatly reduced.
--scott
--
"C'est un Nagra. C'est suisse, et tres, tres precis."
Stan Barr
<mnah...@trein.ntc.nokia.com> wrote:
>
>However, there's something even worse than icons - thumbnails.
Absolutely! Although I must admit I use them for graphics files on the Mac.
When you have a few thousand photos it's hard to remember what name refers to
what file, a thumbnail is a very useful timesaver then - but *only* then :-)
--
Cheers,
Stan Barr stanb .at. dial .dot. pipex .dot. com
(Remove any digits from the addresses when mailing me.)
The future was never like this!
loise little
can
> visually represent concepts with a much higher information content per
pixel
> than any representation based on alphabets such as Latin (or Sanskrit).
>
> Is there any chance that the Anglo-centric technology industry can be
> persuaded to adopt this or a similar idea?
>
im wondering what it would cost.
and what about angelic script?, it has a pretty big deal with lots of
characters, some of the names i have seen were pretty complex.
Rob Warnock
+---------------
| Well, that is traditional already. A lot of machines used to use the
| ascii (or local display code) value for A as the top byte for the add
| instruction, the code for S as subtract, and so forth. Of course,
| that was in the days when human beings would often have to read or
| write machine code, even if only to decipher coredumps.
The venerable LGP-30 (circa 1959) was such a machine: four bits of the
Flexowriter character code for the instruction mnemonics *were* the
instruction codes. Bootstrap instructions were typed in with a console
switch set to read only four bits of each six-bit character, thus
one typed instructions (with hex addresses) directly into the machine,
without needing an assembler. IIRC, the 16 codes were as follows
["Z" = "Stop" isn't exactly mnemonic, but easy enough to remember]:
code char
0 Z Stop [conditional on console switches & track addr]
1 B Bring [load]
2 Y Yank(?) [store AC<addr_field> ==> mem<addr_field>]
3 R Return address store [nextPC + 1 ==> mem<addr_field>]
4 I Input [shift one 4-/6-bit char from KBD/tape into AC]
5 D Divide
6 N Multiply [saves lower half of result, usually an integer]
7 M Multiply [saves upper half of result, usually a fraction]
8 P Print [shift one char out of AC to typewriter/tape]
9 E Extract [logical-AND memory to AC]
f U Unconditional branch
g T Test and branch if AC negative
j H Hold [store AC, leaving AC unchanged]
k C Clear [store & clear accumulator (AC)]
q A Add [memory to AC]
w S Subtract
Note: The LGP-30 used hex digits, but *not* the ASCII-based hex we all
know today, 0123456789abcdef, since it used Flexowriter code, not ASCII.
Instead, it used 0123456789fgjkqw. (Really.)
Also, since the address field was not right-justified in the instruction,
addresses as typed appeared to be incremented by 4, e.g., the first few
locations in the machine were 0, 4, 8, j, 10, 14, 18, 1j [pronounced
"J-teen"], 20, 24, 28, 2j ["Twenty-J"], etc.
Note#2: The "R" instruction stores the address of the *second* following
instruction ("PC+1" or ".+2") into the target, since the subroutine calling
sequence took two instructions and *modified* the routine being called, e.g.:
...
r123j
u1230 -------> 1230: ... ; first instr of subr...
... <---\ 1234: ...
\ 1238: ...
\-- 123j: u0000 ; return (addr overwritten by "r123j")
-Rob
p.s. Other than the state on the drum (PC, IR, AC), there were
only 15 bits of state (15 flip-flops) in the entire LGP-30 CPU
[plus 6 inverters, 6 non-inverting buffers ("cathode followers"),
and a whole *mess* of passive diode logic (cascaded ANDs and ORs)].
The entire "this state/next state" Boolean equation for the machine
is given in less than six pages of the maintenance manual (typed,
with some symbols hand-drawn).
-----
Rob Warnock <rp...@rpw3.org>
627 26th Avenue <URL:http://rpw3.org/>
San Mateo, CA 94403 (650)572-2607
jmfb...@aol.com
cst...@news.dtpq.com (Christopher C. Stacy) wrote:
>>>>>> On Tue, 08 Jun 2004 17:30:14 +1200, Brian Boutel ("Brian") writes:
>
> Brian> That feature sounds just like lots of programming languages,
> Brian> where you can declare new names almost anywhere, even with
> Brian> context-dependent meanings - the same name can have a
> Brian> different meaning in different scopes.
>
>Speaking of context... In Lisp, any word can mean several things,
>and is understood (eg. by the compiler) only from its syntax.
>
>(defun foo (list other-list)
> (list list other-list))
>
>The above program FOO takes two arguments, one called LIST and one
>called OTHER-LIST. The programmer presumes that these arguments
>will be linked list structures. The program returns a new linked list,
>constructed by calling the built-in function named LIST on the arguments.
Sigh! My brain has never managed to wrap itself around that kind
of construct. It's one of the reasons I'm in awe of anybody who
could LISP.
>
>Another example that FORTRAN or C programmers might be able to
>relate to better would be using the symbol "+" as a variable name,
>even though it is also the name of the addition function.
>(Actually, that very example is done in Lisp, but not many people
>want to name their variable "+". Another example, for C++ folks,
>would be allowing variables to be named "new".)
>
>This is different from (eg. infix) programming languages that base
>their syntax on reserved words. In Lisp, the syntax is more explicit,
>so the programmer has more freedom of expression in naming things.
>You have to be careful not to name things in a confusing way,
>but the FOO example above is more clearly understandable than
>if I had named the first argument "L" or "LST" or something.
[glum emoticon here] I don't seem to be wired for that.
/BAH
Subtract a hundred and four for e-mail.
Heinz W. Wiggeshoff
[snip of interesting machine]
>
> p.s. Other than the state on the drum (PC, IR, AC), there were
> only 15 bits of state (15 flip-flops) in the entire LGP-30 CPU
> [plus 6 inverters, 6 non-inverting buffers ("cathode followers"),
> and a whole *mess* of passive diode logic (cascaded ANDs and ORs)].
> The entire "this state/next state" Boolean equation for the machine
> is given in less than six pages of the maintenance manual (typed,
> with some symbols hand-drawn).
[Third year Elec. Eng., term 1] "Now class, pay attention.
The term project is to implement this machine as closely as
possible using modern (i.e. attainable) components."
[Second year Comp. Sci., term 2] "Class, make Windows XP run
on the machine produced by the EEs last term. Hint: leave
mouse support for the last week of the project."
edens morgan mair fheal greykitten tomys des anges
wrote:
> Scott Dorsey <klu...@panix.com> wrote:
how about coming up with of those olympic style icons
based on copulating dogs and cats
arf arf
David James Polewka
> code char
> 0 Z Stop [conditional on console switches & track addr]
> 1 B Bring [load]
> 2 Y Yank(?) [store AC<addr_field> ==> mem<addr_field>]
> 3 R Return address store [nextPC + 1 ==> mem<addr_field>]
>
> 4 I Input [shift one 4-/6-bit char from KBD/tape into AC]
> 5 D Divide
> 6 N Multiply [saves lower half of result, usually an integer]
> 7 M Multiply [saves upper half of result, usually a fraction]
>
> 8 P Print [shift one char out of AC to typewriter/tape]
> 9 E Extract [logical-AND memory to AC]
> f U Unconditional branch
> g T Test and branch if AC negative
>
> j H Hold [store AC, leaving AC unchanged]
> k C Clear [store & clear accumulator (AC)]
> q A Add [memory to AC]
> w S Subtract
>
>Note: The LGP-30 used hex digits, but *not* the ASCII-based hex we all
>know today, 0123456789abcdef, since it used Flexowriter code, not ASCII.
>Instead, it used 0123456789fgjkqw. (Really.)
So, L, O, V and X were not used?
=========================
"Endeavor to persevere"
=========================
Belanger
Brainfuck?
--
BELANGER
edens morgan mair fheal greykitten tomys des anges
Belanger <ready_TAK...@hotmail.com> wrote:
> Could there be some grammatical similarity between Sanskrit and
> Brainfuck?
its them injuns again
circle the waggons
arf arf
Harold Rabbie
alphabets, so that a small set of characters can be combined to represent an
unlimited number of concepts. Those poor folks relying on ideograms are
stuck with having to memorize thousands of characters, and continually
invent new ones for new concepts.
But at the close of the 20th century, we have been forced (by the
limitations of UI real-estate) to re-introduce ideograms (a.k.a. icons),
with all the same old problems.
I'm not sure whether more people in the world today can sound out words
written in the Latin alphabet, or can understand some subset of Chinese
characters. In any case numbers don't matter. Since we alphabetic
colonialists invented most modern technology, everyone in the world is going
to have to learn the Latin alphabet to make any use of it.
And ever since the invention of ASCII, other alphabets (e.g. Greek, Russian,
Arabic, Hindi), and Latin alphabets with accented letters (most every
European language with the exception of English), have been relegated to an
annoying complication for programmers.
Harold
"Toby Thain" <to...@telegraphics.com.au> wrote in message
news:d6ce4a6c.04060...@posting.google.com...
Generic Usenet Account
> "Edward G. Nilges" wrote:
> >
> ... much snipped garbage ...
>
> That troll Eddie has sneaked in here on a.f.c with his
> nilgewater. This requires plonking the entire thread. He has
> already made life on c.p a living hell.
My initial reaction when I saw CBFalconer's posts dubbing me a troll
and advising users to ignore me, while addressing me in gender-neutral
terms was: "Give him a dose of his own prescribed medicine and just
ignore him".
However, upon seeing this posting, I am irate. This kind of Usenet
McCarthysim ** MUST STOP ** immediately. Falconer must realize that
he does not enjoy any monopoly here. Nobody is forcing him to
participate in these newsgroups. Nobody has entrusted him with the
responsibility to comment upon fellow posters. I doubt if there are
too many posters who are interested in his "plonking" profile. My
advice to him would be to hold his views on fellow posters close to
his chest.
-Bhta
Charlie Gibbs
(Heinz W. Wiggeshoff) writes:
> [Second year Comp. Sci., term 2] "Class, make Windows XP run
> on the machine produced by the EEs last term. Hint: leave
> mouse support for the last week of the project."
Now I _know_ you're pulling our legs. Windows doesn't run without
a mouse!
--
/~\ cgi...@kltpzyxm.invalid (Charlie Gibbs)
\ / I'm really at ac.dekanfrus if you read it the right way.
X Top-posted messages will probably be ignored. See RFC1855.
/ \ HTML will DEFINITELY be ignored. Join the ASCII ribbon campaign!
arargh4...@now.at.arargh.com
wrote:
>In article <ca71mf$3me$1...@freenet9.carleton.ca> ab...@FreeNet.Carleton.CA
>(Heinz W. Wiggeshoff) writes:
>
>> [Second year Comp. Sci., term 2] "Class, make Windows XP run
>> on the machine produced by the EEs last term. Hint: leave
>> mouse support for the last week of the project."
>
>Now I _know_ you're pulling our legs. Windows doesn't run without
>a mouse!
Sure they do. Well, I don't know about XP, however NT4 & W98 will run
with a mouse. They complain about it, and you have to jump thru all
kind of hoops to do anything useful without one, but windows does run.
Poorly. But that's normal, anyway.
--
Arargh405 at [drop the 'http://www.' from ->] http://www.arargh.com
BCET Basic Compiler Page: http://www.arargh.com/basic/index.html
To reply by email, remove the garbage from the reply address.
Alan Balmer
<hzra...@comcast.net> wrote:
>Isn't it ironic? We in the West pride ourselves on having invented
>alphabets, so that a small set of characters can be combined to represent an
>unlimited number of concepts. Those poor folks relying on ideograms are
>stuck with having to memorize thousands of characters, and continually
>invent new ones for new concepts.
>
>But at the close of the 20th century, we have been forced (by the
>limitations of UI real-estate) to re-introduce ideograms (a.k.a. icons),
>with all the same old problems.
Great observation. One nit: the western world didn't invent alphabets
(or at least not exclusively.) Even movable type was invented long
before Gutenberg.
Helmut P. Einfalt
>> Now I _know_ you're pulling our legs. Windows doesn't run without
>> a mouse!
> Sure they do. They complain about it, and you have to jump thru all
> kind of hoops to do anything useful without one, but windows does
run.
> Poorly. But that's normal, anyway.
Actually, Windows NT4 and NT5 (aka W2k) does run *fine* without a
mouse. In some respects even better than with a mouse (known issues
are for instance M$ mouse drivers for M$ mice getting stuck after
applying a M$ ServicePack and M$ bugfixes to a M$ product...) -- the
only problem is that is absolutely awkward to handle without a
mouse...
Helmut
--
All typos Š My Knotty Fingers Ltd. Capacity Dept.
Edward G. Nilges
> CBFalconer <cbfal...@yahoo.com> wrote in message news:<40C56E3E...@yahoo.com>...
> > "Edward G. Nilges" wrote:
> > >
> > ... much snipped garbage ...
> >
> > That troll Eddie has sneaked in here on a.f.c with his
> > nilgewater. This requires plonking the entire thread. He has
> > already made life on c.p a living hell.
>
>
> My initial reaction when I saw CBFalconer's posts dubbing me a troll
> and advising users to ignore me, while addressing me in gender-neutral
> terms was: "Give him a dose of his own prescribed medicine and just
> ignore him".
>
> However, upon seeing this posting, I am irate. This kind of Usenet
> McCarthysim ** MUST STOP ** immediately. Falconer must realize that
I agree. And it appears that the people most ready to call others
"trolls" are the least able to defend their positions using anything
other than childish abuse.
My comments on "Sanskrit as a programming language" were of course
polite and on-topic and as such in adherence to usenet guidelines.
Postings like Falconer's are strictly speaking off-topic and in
violation of courtesy guidelines, not least because the usage of
"troll" is isomorphic to that of "nigger".
Since Sep 11 and attendant on the offshore phenomenon, I think there
are a lot of fat, out of shape, and technically obsolete American
programmers whiling away their unemployed time in digital cafes
lashing out at the world, and appointing themselves usenet moderators
without portfolio because they hate and fear otherness in any
manifestation, even that form of otherness which is constituted in the
refusal of a fashionable deviance.
Rob Warnock
+---------------
Well, the Flexowriter code used by the LGP-30 was a bit weird, at least
to modern sensibilities. The Flexowriter was an "old-style" typewriter,
and like many typewriters of its day, didn't have a separate "1" key --
it used lowercase-L ("l") for that purpose instead. Also, with only a
6-bit code available, it used "stateful" shifts for alphabetic case,
as had been the case with Baudot telegraph code. That is, "l" & "L"
read as, and were printed with, the *same* code, differing only by
whether there had been a preceding "shift-lock-upper" character sent
or not. And since normally input was done in 4-bit mode, all of "l",
"L", "B", and "b" read as the same thing, decimal 1. Likewise,
"@", "2", "Y" and "y" read as the same thing, decimal 2, and so on.
That said, to finally answer your question:
- "L" was used as the digit 1 (as above).
- The low-order 4 bits of V, O, & X duplicated the codes used by
{<pi>,"7","M","m"}, {<sigma>",8","P","p"}, and {"(",9","E","e"},
respectively, so while they were available for output, they had
no particular defined input function.
-Rob
Toby Thain
> Isn't it ironic? We in the West pride ourselves on having invented
> alphabets, so that a small set of characters can be combined to represent an
> unlimited number of concepts. Those poor folks relying on ideograms are
> stuck with having to memorize thousands of characters, and continually
> invent new ones for new concepts.
>
> colonialists invented most modern technology, everyone in the world is going
> to have to learn the Latin alphabet to make any use of it.
>
> And ever since the invention of ASCII, other alphabets (e.g. Greek, Russian,
> Arabic, Hindi), and Latin alphabets with accented letters (most every
> European language with the exception of English), have been relegated to an
> annoying complication for programmers.
Although his style is easily misconstrued, if I understand McLuhan
correctly, he argues that it's not "alphabetic colonialism", nor
historical accident that allowed phonetic alphabets to predominate
among the "developed" nations. His book pegs differential
social/cultural/scientific development through history to qualities of
prevailing media. For instance, that to proceed through certain phases
of technological development requires symbolic abstractions and habits
of thought not fostered by pictograms. He explains it better than I
could ever summarise it. I recommend the book ("The Gutenberg
Galaxy").
The fact that the Roman alphabet prevailed over other phonetic
alphabets is the historical accident.
T
Amit
> bk...@elektrubadur.se (Björn Lindström) wrote in message news:<s38ekor...@numerus.ling.uu.se>...
> > "Anton van Straaten" <ant...@acm.org> writes:
> >
> > > "Panini's grammar consists of nearly 4,000 rules divided into eight
> > > chapters. It provides a collection of 2,000 roots. Being composed with the
> > > maximum conceivable brevity, this grammar describes the entire Sanskrit
> > > language in all the details of its structure, with a unity which has never
> > > been equalled elsewhere. It is at once the shortest and fullest grammar in
> > > the world." [1]
> >
> > That would indicate that he didn't systematised the whole language. A
> > natural language is a lot more complex than that.
> >
> > There is no reason to believe that Sanskrit was any simpler than other
> > natural languages. We just don't know all of it.
>
> As someone who has studied Sanskrit up to middle school, I can say
> that Sanskrit is not a very easy language to master (note that the
> word used is master and not learn). What especially got on my nerves
> was this thing called "sandhee-viched", the ability to coin new words
> on the fly. In my experience, sometimes these "new" words tended to
> have context-dependent meanings. In my opinion, a constrained
> version of the Sanskrit grammar may be more suitable as a computer
> language.
>
> --Nimmi
Nimmi the sutability of a language to be used in programming depends
on
how well it an unambiguasly represent a programm and not essentialy on
complaxity. When we talk of Sanskrit as programming language what we
essentaly mean is if a compiler/interpretor can be written for
Sanskrit and answer is yes
but same can not be said for English,hindi , french or other natural
language grammers.
Constrained/ unconstrained version does not alter the question of
sutability of
sanskrit in any way.
If you could not master Sandhi- vicched ( Ideally you should write
Sandhi because sandhi means to join two or more words to coin new
word. Sandhi-Vicched is breakup of complex word in two its
roots)probably it was fault of your sanskrit teacher or you were not
inclied enough to master them.
Sanskrit has a well defined set of rules for Sandhi which are clear
enough to be coded and create a sanskrit compiler.
David James Polewka
>David James Polewka <josey...@outlaw.nospam> wrote:
>+---------------
>| So, L, O, V and X were not used?
>+---------------
>
>- "L" was used as the digit 1 (as above).
>
>- The low-order 4 bits of V, O, & X duplicated the codes used by
> {<pi>,"7","M","m"}, {<sigma>",8","P","p"}, and {"(",9","E","e"},
> respectively, so while they were available for output, they had
> no particular defined input function.
Rob Warnock, Consulting Systems Architect -- anagram
******************************************************
Like IBM, he concocts grants, wants to scurry!
******************************************************
M. Ranjit Mathews
> nimmi_s...@yahoo.com (Nimmi Srivastav) wrote ...
> > bk...@elektrubadur.se (Björn Lindström) wrote ...
... but has it been done? Has anyone written a parser for Sanskrit and
parsed a large variety of Sanskrit literature with it?
> but same can not be said for English, hindi, french or other natural
> language grammers.
A number of parsers have been written for English and French. A
certain proportion of Siemens' internal documentation and/or company
policies are translated authomatically between English and German.
> Constrained/ unconstrained version does not alter the question of
> suitability of sanskrit in any way.
>
> If you could not master Sandhi- vicched ( Ideally you should write
> Sandhi because sandhi means to join two or more words to coin new
> word. Sandhi-Vicched is breakup of complex word in two its
> roots)probably it was fault of your sanskrit teacher or you were not
> inclied enough to master them.
> Sanskrit has a well defined set of rules for Sandhi which are clear
> enough to be coded and create a sanskrit compiler.
According to one of the sandhi rules,
dvisÛ se (you hate) is pronounced as dviksÛe
http://www.tphta.ws/TPH_SSCS.HTM
Would it be easier to parse the (small) sentence "dviksÛe!" into
"dvisÛ" and "se" than to parse "You hate!" into "you" and "hate".
Amit
>
> > but same can not be said for English, hindi, french or other natural
> > language grammers.
>
> A number of parsers have been written for English and French. A
> certain proportion of Siemens' internal documentation and/or company
> policies are translated authomatically between English and German.
What you are talking about is language translation using parsers . A
compiler
in a programming langauge is not just parser. Parsing is in initial
stage
for compilation. What I essentialy ment was using Sanskrit grammer
rules
to represnt logic unambiguosly. The idea was floted in a 1985 paper
by Rick Briggs' "Knowledge Representation in Sanskrit
and Artificial Intelligence,"
The Idea that was discussed was to use a natural language as a
computer language. Sanskrit because of its rigid and unambigous
grammer can be used
but how useful it will be as ompared to other existing laguages is a
debatable point.
>
> > Constrained/ unconstrained version does not alter the question of
> > suitability of sanskrit in any way.
> >
> > If you could not master Sandhi- vicched ( Ideally you should write
> > Sandhi because sandhi means to join two or more words to coin new
> > word. Sandhi-Vicched is breakup of complex word in two its
> > roots)probably it was fault of your sanskrit teacher or you were not
> > inclied enough to master them.
> > Sanskrit has a well defined set of rules for Sandhi which are clear
> > enough to be coded and create a sanskrit compiler.
>
> According to one of the sandhi rules,
> dvisÛ se (you hate) is pronounced as dviksÛe
> http://www.tphta.ws/TPH_SSCS.HTM
> Would it be easier to parse the (small) sentence "dviksÛe!" into
> "dvisÛ" and "se" than to parse "You hate!" into "you" and "hate".
I really dont know
Michael Wojcik
In article <v1kec0d6abcquqkcc...@4ax.com>, arargh4...@NOW.AT.arargh.com writes:
> On 09 Jun 04 08:15:50 -0800, "Charlie Gibbs" <cgi...@kltpzyxm.invalid>
> wrote:
>
> >Now I _know_ you're pulling our legs. Windows doesn't run without
> >a mouse!
> Sure they do. Well, I don't know about XP, however NT4 & W98 will run
> with a mouse. They complain about it, and you have to jump thru all
> kind of hoops to do anything useful without one, but windows does run.
> Poorly. But that's normal, anyway.
The first project I worked on at IBM was the "DOS 4.0 and Windows Kit",
a short-lived attempt to create a software bundle that would turn the
low-end PS/2s into "Mac killers" for the academic market. The core of
the bundle was PC-DOS 4.0 and either Windows 2.0 or Windows/286,
depending on which PS/2 it was installed on.
Our test suite included running every program in the bundle mouseless,
since a mouse wasn't a prerequisite for the kit. You haven't had the
full GUI experience until you've used half a dozen applets on a PS/2
Model 25 running Windows 2.0 without a mouse.
--
Michael Wojcik michael...@microfocus.com
Do not "test" parts, as this may compromise sensitive joinery. Those who
suffer difficulty should abandon the enterprise immediately. -- Chris Ware
Brian Inglis
mwo...@newsguy.com (Michael Wojcik) wrote:
>
>In article <v1kec0d6abcquqkcc...@4ax.com>, arargh4...@NOW.AT.arargh.com writes:
>> On 09 Jun 04 08:15:50 -0800, "Charlie Gibbs" <cgi...@kltpzyxm.invalid>
>> wrote:
>>
>> >Now I _know_ you're pulling our legs. Windows doesn't run without
>> >a mouse!
>> Sure they do. Well, I don't know about XP, however NT4 & W98 will run
>> with a mouse. They complain about it, and you have to jump thru all
>> kind of hoops to do anything useful without one, but windows does run.
>> Poorly. But that's normal, anyway.
>
>The first project I worked on at IBM was the "DOS 4.0 and Windows Kit",
>a short-lived attempt to create a software bundle that would turn the
>low-end PS/2s into "Mac killers" for the academic market. The core of
>the bundle was PC-DOS 4.0 and either Windows 2.0 or Windows/286,
>depending on which PS/2 it was installed on.
>
>Our test suite included running every program in the bundle mouseless,
>since a mouse wasn't a prerequisite for the kit. You haven't had the
>full GUI experience until you've used half a dozen applets on a PS/2
>Model 25 running Windows 2.0 without a mouse.
Sounds like more fun than trying to use Hummingbird Xserver under
Windows on a PS/2 Portable to bring up DCE on AIX: I think I let it
come up, before I shut it down and just used telnet client windows.
--
Thanks. Take care, Brian Inglis Calgary, Alberta, Canada
Brian....@CSi.com (Brian dot Inglis at SystematicSw dot ab dot ca)
fake address use address above to reply
Daniel.
> Brainfuck?
Well, they can both be described by context-free grammars.
Ray Dillinger
Um. Panini's grammar for Sanskrit is context-sensitive.
Bear
edens morgan mair fheal greykitten tomys des anges
Ray Dillinger <be...@sonic.net> wrote:
my iconic language would be content responsive
oooooooo nice fluffy
arf meow arf
Daniel.
"Can be" is not "have long been", but if you want to go further and
deny my previous statement I won't be in a position to argue with you.
edens morgan mair fheal greykitten tomys des anges
cris...@hevanet.com (Daniel.) wrote:
denied
arf meow arf
nenslo
>
> Harold Rabbie wrote:
>
> > To solve this problem once and for all, I propose worldwide adoption of a
> > recognized and understood by billions of people, and c) have a well-defined
> > Unicode representation...
> >
> > Is there any chance that the Anglo-centric technology industry can be
> > persuaded to adopt this or a similar idea?
>
> pictographic writing system as "mediaglyphics" or
> whatever, ....
> There is a lesson somewhere in all of this.
A universal iconic language, Semantography or Blissymbolics, was
invented in the last century by one C. K. Bliss. It is in limited use
as a means of communication with the severely disabled.
http://www.symbols.net/blissymbolics/bhome/
http://www.omniglot.com/writing/blissymbolics.htm
Brian {Hamilton Kelly}
nen...@yahoox.com "nenslo" wrote:
> A universal iconic language, Semantography or Blissymbolics, was
> invented in the last century by one C. K. Bliss. It is in limited use
> as a means of communication with the severely disabled.
Is that the same Bliss who had an alternative [to Dewey] for cataloguing
libraries?
(Ca.1961, I spent three months converting the Science Library at Warwick
School[1] from Bliss to UDC; i.e. skipping over Dewey altogether.)
[1] England's third oldest school: founded in 914. Only King's School
Canterbury and St Peter's York are older.
--
fix (vb.): 1. to paper over, obscure, hide from public view; 2. to
work around, in a way that produces unintended consequences that are
worse than the original problem. Usage: "Windows ME fixes many of the
shortcomings of Windows 98 SE".
edens morgan mair fheal greykitten tomys des anges
b...@dsl.co.uk (Brian {Hamilton Kelly}) wrote:
> On Saturday, in article <40DD1F29...@yahoox.com>
> nen...@yahoox.com "nenslo" wrote:
>
> > A universal iconic language, Semantography or Blissymbolics, was
> > invented in the last century by one C. K. Bliss. It is in limited use
> > as a means of communication with the severely disabled.
>
> Is that the same Bliss who had an alternative [to Dewey] for cataloguing
> libraries?
no
this one was an owner operator of a quick mart at fifth and main
between the foundry and machine shop
between kennel and race track
arf meow arf
John Savard
> To solve this problem once and for all, I propose worldwide adoption of a
> set of universal icons that a) are mostly unambiguous, b) are already
> recognized and understood by billions of people, and c) have a well-defined
> visually represent concepts with a much higher information content per pixel
> than any representation based on alphabets such as Latin (or Sanskrit).
> Is there any chance that the Anglo-centric technology industry can be
> persuaded to adopt this or a similar idea?
No.
Because it *isn't* a very good idea.
Chinese characters are not already recognized and understood by people
outside the areas of the world where associated languages are spoken.
A picture of a magnifying glass is more useful than the Chinese
character for "search", a picture of a trash can is more useful than
the Chinese character for "delete", in a GUI.
Also, the reason the Chinese people can memorize all those characters
is precisely because Chinese characters are *not* universal. A small
number of them are indeed (highly stylized) pictograms, for "man", or
"heart", and so on. Most Chinese characters, however, are *phonetic*,
consisting of two or more pictograms organized with the first one
indicating the general area of meaning of the character, and the
remainder forming another Chinese character with the same or a similar
pronounciation.
Thus, if you don't understand Chinese (the Japanese use Chinese words
the way we English-speakers use Latin and Greek, so they do know a
stock of Chinese vocabulary items, which helps them manage Kanji),
then Chinese characters are of very limited utility.
Kate Orman
> To solve this problem once and for all, I propose worldwide adoption of a
> set of universal icons that a) are mostly unambiguous, b) are already
> recognized and understood by billions of people, and c) have a well-defined
> Unicode representation. I refer of course to Chinese characters, which can
> visually represent concepts with a much higher information content per pixel
> than any representation based on alphabets such as Latin (or Sanskrit).
I want John Searle's opinion on this.
- Ormazoid
Brian Inglis
news:<FAbxc.2319$0y.1101@attbi_s03>...
> To solve this problem once and for all, I propose worldwide adoption of a
> set of universal icons that a) are mostly unambiguous, b) are already
> recognized and understood by billions of people, and c) have a well-defined
> Unicode representation. I refer of course to Chinese characters, which can
> visually represent concepts with a much higher information content per pixel
> than any representation based on alphabets such as Latin (or Sanskrit).
ISTM that a character code of 2-6 bytes (depending on code set), and
32 bytes for the graphic representation, does not represent higher
information content per anything than crude ASCII text on a terminal.
edens morgan mair fheal greykitten tomys des anges
Brian Inglis <Brian....@SystematicSw.Invalid> wrote:
> "Harold Rabbie" <hzra...@comcast.net> wrote in message
> news:<FAbxc.2319$0y.1101@attbi_s03>...
> > To solve this problem once and for all, I propose worldwide adoption of a
> > set of universal icons that a) are mostly unambiguous, b) are already
> > recognized and understood by billions of people, and c) have a well-defined
> > Unicode representation. I refer of course to Chinese characters, which can
> > visually represent concepts with a much higher information content per pixel
> > than any representation based on alphabets such as Latin (or Sanskrit).
>
> ISTM that a character code of 2-6 bytes (depending on code set), and
> 32 bytes for the graphic representation, does not represent higher
> information content per anything than crude ASCII text on a terminal.
you can increase the information density with adaptive huffy code
based on film icons like joan crawford
she has joan crawford bytes
arf meow arf
Ray Dillinger
> Although his style is easily misconstrued, if I understand McLuhan
> correctly, he argues that it's not "alphabetic colonialism", nor
> historical accident that allowed phonetic alphabets to predominate
> among the "developed" nations. His book pegs differential
> social/cultural/scientific development through history to qualities of
> prevailing media. For instance, that to proceed through certain phases
> of technological development requires symbolic abstractions and habits
> of thought not fostered by pictograms. He explains it better than I
> could ever summarise it. I recommend the book ("The Gutenberg
> Galaxy").
>
> The fact that the Roman alphabet prevailed over other phonetic
> alphabets is the historical accident.
You have not misconstrued him; McLuhan believes that alphabetic
writing systems are clearly superior and foster habits of thought
that give the cultures who use them substantial advantages over
any culture that uses a pictographic or heiroglyphic writing
system. Judging by the evolution of writing systems and literacy
rates through history, I would have to agree.
It's one of those inventions like the wheel or steelworking or
computers; once somebody has invented it, you either adopt it,
or you get crushed under the wheels of history and forgotten.
That said, the Roman Alphabet is one among many; I would regard
it as a historical accident that the Roman Alphabet rather than
some other alphabet, became dominant - but not an accident
that an alphabetic writing system is dominant over all other
writing systems.
Bear
Edward G. Nilges
> "Harold Rabbie" <hzra...@comcast.net> wrote in message news:<yNGxc.20020$HG.19151@attbi_s53>...
> > Isn't it ironic? We in the West pride ourselves on having invented
> > alphabets, so that a small set of characters can be combined to represent an
> > unlimited number of concepts. Those poor folks relying on ideograms are
> > stuck with having to memorize thousands of characters, and continually
> > invent new ones for new concepts.
"Those poor folks relying on ideograms" such as the Chinese (1)
invented printing before the West, (2) invented gunpowder, and used it
for peaceful purposes, before the West, (3) never thought it cute to
enslave or enserf most of the population so a few bastards could take
it easy, and (4) until 1750 were more "civilized" than the West.
Even in the 1840s, the West's "industrial revolution" produced
products too inferior in make for the Chinese to wish to buy their
"hempen homespun" and the only product the West could vend was opium
which conveniently locks-in its customer through addiction.
"Having to memorize thousands of characters" focuses the mind and for
fifty years have made Chinese students better at learning real
computer science than Westerners.
In general, and as Chomsky has I think tried to point out, the human
ability to create language is independent of any one writing system.
The use of separate symbols may offend a reductionistic mind that
wishes above all a mistaken "simplicity" but has the advantage of
serving as a reminder that precisely because there are Ten Thousand
Things, paying attention might be important.
The attraction after all of reductionistic writing systems is that the
student doesn't have to pay attention as much, but can be given a
small set of rules in a brief interval. The downside is that this
reduces healthy contact between different generations and as such
diminishes both respect for the older generation, and care for the
younger.
Perhaps the result is the Western situation in which adolescents feel
compelled at all times to create their own culture in the form of
garage-bands-that-suck.
> >
> > ... Since we alphabetic
> > colonialists invented most modern technology, everyone in the world is going
> > to have to learn the Latin alphabet to make any use of it.
> >
> > And ever since the invention of ASCII, other alphabets (e.g. Greek, Russian,
> > Arabic, Hindi), and Latin alphabets with accented letters (most every
> > European language with the exception of English), have been relegated to an
> > annoying complication for programmers.
>
> Although his style is easily misconstrued, if I understand McLuhan
> correctly, he argues that it's not "alphabetic colonialism", nor
> historical accident that allowed phonetic alphabets to predominate
> among the "developed" nations. His book pegs differential
> social/cultural/scientific development through history to qualities of
> prevailing media. For instance, that to proceed through certain phases
> of technological development requires symbolic abstractions and habits
> of thought not fostered by pictograms. He explains it better than I
> could ever summarise it. I recommend the book ("The Gutenberg
> Galaxy").
>
According however, to Clive Ponting (in World History, a New
Perspective) the only difference between Chinese culture at its zenith
circa 1750, and Western culture today, is the latter's use of fossil
fuels, an era that is ending.
As to McLuhan: his earlier work is more interesting. The Mechanical
Bride is a critique of the downside of Western reification and
fetishization. I think the later McLuhan was corrupted into a
spokesman for mid-1960s companies that wanted to destroy other centers
of culture. The long term result was the barbarism at Wired magazine,
in which it appears the gentle, the kind, and the merely literate were
alike met with a sloppy "McLuhanism" which was at best regression to
barbarism with a fancy name.
Precisely in the same way a great programmer can code great programs
in Visual Basic or Cobol, and indeed his greatness shines through the
mastery of the rough medium, Chinese culture was able to overcome any
deficiencies in the writing system (which are matched by the
reductionist deficiency of the Western system).
Corey Murtagh
> to...@telegraphics.com.au (Toby Thain) wrote in message news:<d6ce4a6c.04061...@posting.google.com>...
>
>>"Harold Rabbie" <hzra...@comcast.net> wrote in message news:<yNGxc.20020$HG.19151@attbi_s53>...
>>
>>>Isn't it ironic? We in the West pride ourselves on having invented
>>>alphabets, so that a small set of characters can be combined to represent an
>>>unlimited number of concepts. Those poor folks relying on ideograms are
>>>stuck with having to memorize thousands of characters, and continually
>>>invent new ones for new concepts.
>
> "Those poor folks relying on ideograms" such as the Chinese (1)
> invented printing before the West, (2) invented gunpowder, and used it
> for peaceful purposes, before the West, (3) never thought it cute to
> enslave or enserf most of the population so a few bastards could take
> it easy, and (4) until 1750 were more "civilized" than the West.
There's at one piece of Nilgesque revisionism in that, and at one
statement of opinion. I suggest everyone take it with a very large
grain of salt.
<snip>
> According however, to Clive Ponting (in World History, a New
> Perspective) the only difference between Chinese culture at its zenith
> circa 1750, and Western culture today, is the latter's use of fossil
> fuels, an era that is ending.
If he truly believed that, then he is every bit as much of a fool as you
are. That's quite an achievement in its own right.
--
Corey Murtagh
The Electric Monk
"Quidquid latine dictum sit, altum viditur!"
Mike Fahlbusch
<hzra...@comcast.net> wrote:
>The proliferation of meaningless icons in GUIs has always frustrated me.
>Especially in some of the more sophisticated graphical editors, the need to
>come up with a unique bitmap image for each function button seems to have
>rapidly outgrown the imaginations of the GUI designers.
>In multilingual environments like Europe, this disease has even spread to
>consumer appliances such as washing machines and remote controls. In order
>to avoid having to label each function in eighteen languages, each European
>manufacturer has adopted its own idiosyncratic set of symbols, equally
>unintelligible to all.
>To solve this problem once and for all, I propose worldwide adoption of a
>set of universal icons that a) are mostly unambiguous, b) are already
>recognized and understood by billions of people, and c) have a well-defined
>Unicode representation. I refer of course to Chinese characters, which can
>visually represent concepts with a much higher information content per pixel
>than any representation based on alphabets such as Latin (or Sanskrit).
>Is there any chance that the Anglo-centric technology industry can be
>persuaded to adopt this or a similar idea?
We could adopt a symbol system like the one for electrical on/off
where a closed pipe (no flow) represents on, and an open pipe (flow)
represents off.
Firstly we would need to prove that there is such a thing as a
universally understood set of symbols.
Sig:
I have a brain the size of a planet. It's not much good to me, however. It's on a different planet.
BELANGER
>We could adopt a symbol system like the one for electrical on/off
>where a closed pipe (no flow) represents on, and an open pipe (flow)
>represents off.
>
>Firstly we would need to prove that there is such a thing as a
>universally understood set of symbols.
Obviously not. I always thought those symbols were 1 (on) and 0
(off).
--
BELANGER
Silly me.
Jack Peacock
news:t9nge0134mre21ehu...@4ax.com...
> >Firstly we would need to prove that there is such a thing as a
> >universally understood set of symbols.
>
> Obviously not. I always thought those symbols were 1 (on) and 0
> (off).
>
hazard a guess that it could not be considered universal. What was the
chinese ideogram for zero before arabic numbers appeared?
On and off were also different concepts prior to electricity. Is it any
accident that the appearance of boolean algebra and discrete mathematics
started about the same time as the telegraph?
Jack Peacock
edens morgan mair fheal greykitten tomys des anges
BELANGER <ready_TAK...@hotmail.com> wrote:
no
a vertical bar means on
an angled barkeep means get off
a horizontal bar patron means i get off
mod sox xos pow
Té Rowan
>Edward G. Nilges wrote:
>
>> According however, to Clive Ponting (in World History, a New
>> Perspective) the only difference between Chinese culture at its zenith
>> circa 1750, and Western culture today, is the latter's use of fossil
>> fuels, an era that is ending.
>
>If he truly believed that, then he is every bit as much of a fool as you
>are. That's quite an achievement in its own right.
We know better. The only difference is that we've got electronics.
--
Té Rowan (reyn...@mi.is)
Corey Murtagh
Unfortunately there are other differences... like the fact that eddie
would have been beheaded out of hand by some local lord well before now.
I guess old China had an upside.
Morten Reistad
Ray Dillinger <be...@sonic.net> wrote:
>Toby Thain wrote:
>> The fact that the Roman alphabet prevailed over other phonetic
>> alphabets is the historical accident.
>
>You have not misconstrued him; McLuhan believes that alphabetic
>writing systems are clearly superior and foster habits of thought
>that give the cultures who use them substantial advantages over
>any culture that uses a pictographic or heiroglyphic writing
>system. Judging by the evolution of writing systems and literacy
>rates through history, I would have to agree.
Then go tell the Chinese; and the Japanese. And wonder why Thailand, Korea,
Indonesia and Vietnam haven't taken control over the far east.
>It's one of those inventions like the wheel or steelworking or
>computers; once somebody has invented it, you either adopt it,
>or you get crushed under the wheels of history and forgotten.
>
>That said, the Roman Alphabet is one among many; I would regard
>it as a historical accident that the Roman Alphabet rather than
>some other alphabet, became dominant - but not an accident
>that an alphabetic writing system is dominant over all other
>writing systems.
There are soem things about the roman alphabet that sets it out
among the others: Simplicity and minimalism.
Later alphabets like arab script have a similar simplicity, but that
has reverted in modern arab. Cyrillic is similar, but is mainly a
latin adaption to another language family with some different sound
rules. (disclaimer : I only learnt enough arab and cyrlillic to be
able to read street signs).
Greek have a lot of complexity, especially the pre-Koine (as in
pre-New Testament) script.
But go look at Thai. The complexity of that script is mindboggling.
-- mrr
Bob Bain
<hzra...@comcast.net> wrote in message id
<yNGxc.20020$HG.19151@attbi_s53>:
>Isn't it ironic? We in the West pride ourselves on having invented
>alphabets, so that a small set of characters can be combined to represent an
>unlimited number of concepts. Those poor folks relying on ideograms are
>stuck with having to memorize thousands of characters, and continually
>invent new ones for new concepts.
I believe that around 1940 a great number of Japanese were
functionally illitereate as they couldn't understand their own written
language.
In 1946 from my understanding the Japanese government decided to do
somethig about it...
http://www.fact-index.com/k/ka/kanji.html
------------------------------------------------------------------------
In 1946 the Japanese government sought to simplify the usage of Kanji
in Japanese literature and periodicals and defined the touyou kanji
(kanji for daily use) set comprised of 1850 characters. This list of
kanji was modified in 1981 to a set of 1950 characters called the
jouyou kanji (essential characters). Characters that were culled from
daily usage were replaced by combinations of the simpler jouyou kanji
characters. Guessing the meaning of a kanji character from its Chinese
meaning can be very misleading.
-------------------------------------------------------------------------
There's some talk on-line of the "old Kanji" and the "new Kanji" and
how nations that base their writing on such script are attempting to
come to grips with uniformity.
If nuclear war ever starts it will probably be because someone in
China misunderstood some other nations representation of an idea.
Our own language set is very limited which is why we have words with
dual meanings which leads to enormous ambiguity both in speech and in
philosphical thought.
John Savard
> "Those poor folks relying on ideograms" such as the Chinese (1)
> invented printing before the West, (2) invented gunpowder, and used it
> for peaceful purposes, before the West, (3) never thought it cute to
> enslave or enserf most of the population so a few bastards could take
> it easy, and (4) until 1750 were more "civilized" than the West.
Ever wonder where the phrase "oriental despot" came from?
Until Sun Yat-Sen brought democracy to China in 1911, China had been,
through almost all of its history, ruled by iron dictatorships. This
was due to its geographical situation: mountain barriers did not lead,
as in Europe, to many separate areas being able to maintain their
independence, and the country was under a pressing need to be well
organized to defend against nomadic Mongol invaders from the north.
They weren't *forced* to allow unrestricted technical advance, which
could undermine the stability of Imperial rule, because they weren't
in danger of the Mongols coming up with better muskets.
A Europe in which the Inquisition could ban the firearm would not have
been superior to the Europe we have in the real world, and the same is
true of China. They used gunpowder only in fireworks not because they
were more civilized and humane, but because that was the use the
Emperor permitted.
> "Having to memorize thousands of characters" focuses the mind and for
> fifty years have made Chinese students better at learning real
> computer science than Westerners.
Fortunately, as I've noted, the Chinese situation isn't that bad. A
few hundred characters need to be memorized, and the rest are built up
based on the sound of the syllables.
It is true that, in Western countries, the Chinese and Jewish
minorities have participated in the progress of the arts and sciences
to an above-average extent, unlike most other disadvantaged
minorities.
The effort required to be literate in the Confucian classics, or to
recite Scripture in the original for one's Bar Mitzvah, has meant that
book-learning has never been regarded by the youth of these minority
groups as a sell-out to the Man or something entirely associated with
an alien culture.
> The attraction after all of reductionistic writing systems is that the
> student doesn't have to pay attention as much, but can be given a
> small set of rules in a brief interval.
In a country *like* China, where the countryside is still filled with
peasant farmers with very little cash income, a reductionistic writing
system is the only hope of *mass literacy*. Which is, as we know from
our history, a prerequisite for the emergence of democracy.
China does not have the resources to obtain full literacy in
characters for its whole population. Pinyin could have done that; at
present, the literacy skills of the Chinese peasantry, while not nil,
are severely limited. They can read traffic signs, but not write
letters. (At least, this has been documented in the book "The Chinese
Language".)
Since tones are important to the Chinese language, and it is awkward
for Chinese people to take tone into account consciously, I do feel
that the ideal writing system for Chinese would probably include some
elements of the current system, perhaps the use of character-based
determinatives for alphabetically-written words. Under current
economic conditions, characters are forestalling mass literacy, but
that doesn't mean characters are incompatible with Chinese democracy,
merely that they postpone it to a later stage of economic development:
Taiwan gets along quite nicely.
But for other reasons, such as geography, China was a despotic empire
for much of its history, and that led it to turn its back on
technology and exploration. It did not do so, however wicked many of
the actions of the West during the colonial period may have been, as
the result of moral superiority.
John Savard
Stan Barr
>
>On and off were also different concepts prior to electricity. Is it any
>accident that the appearance of boolean algebra and discrete mathematics
>started about the same time as the telegraph?
OTOH the concept of binary values was understood long before that, I think
they just couldn't see a use for it.
Execpt Francis Bacon, of course, who invented a 5-bit telegraph code in 1623.
He wrote: "Neither is it a small matter these Cypher-Characters have, and may
performe: For by this Art a way is opened, whereby a man may expresse and
signifie the intentions of his minde, at any distance of place, by objects
which may be presented to the eye, and accommodated to the eare: provided
those objects may be capable of a twofold difference onely; as by Bells, by
Trumpets, by Lights and Torches, by the report of Muskets, and any instrument
of like nature"
--
Cheers,
Stan Barr stanb .at. dial .dot. pipex .dot. com
(Remove any digits from the addresses when mailing me.)
The future was never like this!
Ray Dillinger
> In article <3qBFc.199$54....@typhoon.sonic.net>,
> Ray Dillinger <be...@sonic.net> wrote:
>
>>You have not misconstrued him; McLuhan believes that alphabetic
>>writing systems are clearly superior and foster habits of thought
>>that give the cultures who use them substantial advantages over
>>any culture that uses a pictographic or heiroglyphic writing
>>system. Judging by the evolution of writing systems and literacy
>>rates through history, I would have to agree.
>
>
> Then go tell the Chinese; and the Japanese. And wonder why Thailand, Korea,
> Indonesia and Vietnam haven't taken control over the far east.
The Chinese had writing, currency, and bureaucracy a thousand
years or more before the west; they are demonstrably smart people
and value education; but they *STILL* fell behind the technology
curve that the 'barbarians' with a simpler and more flexible
writing system climbed in the west. McLuhan beleives that it's
partly because their system of ideograms didn't give them a
convenient flexible way to write about new ideas.
The koreans developed a 'good' writing system (Hangul) relatively
recently, and it's spent most of its time being sneered at
as a writing system for people who couldn't handle 'real'
(ideographic) writing. I don't know the particulars of the
Thai, Indonesian, and Vietnamese writing systems; I could be
wrong but I seem to recall that they are wildly polymorphic,
to the point that the same "character" can have many different
appearances which are so dissimilar that they give no hint as
to the shared identity, or that the flow of phonemes reverses
direction relative to the writing order inside words according
to complex rules.
Ligatures, accents, variant forms, reversals, etc... anything
that complicates the representation of words or multiplies the
number of character forms available - is a disadvantage
according to McLuhan's ideal of simple, flexible writing
systems not getting in the way of how people think.
Bear
Edward G. Nilges
> spino...@yahoo.com (Edward G. Nilges) wrote in message news:<f5dda427.04070...@posting.google.com>...
>
> > "Those poor folks relying on ideograms" such as the Chinese (1)
> > invented printing before the West, (2) invented gunpowder, and used it
> > for peaceful purposes, before the West, (3) never thought it cute to
> > enslave or enserf most of the population so a few bastards could take
> > it easy, and (4) until 1750 were more "civilized" than the West.
>
> Ever wonder where the phrase "oriental despot" came from?
From cheap comic books written by hacks for morons and from Harrison
Ford's racist and sexist revival of that genre in the Indiana Jones
series, in which an actor without the ability to memorize his lines
revived the genre because and his directors had no talent. Any
questions?
>
> Until Sun Yat-Sen brought democracy to China in 1911, China had been,
> through almost all of its history, ruled by iron dictatorships. This
An empire isn't a dictatorship. Even if China's emperors had the
desire to be 20th century style dictators, they lacked the ability.
Furthermore, a totalitarian dictatorship admits no independent
critique whereas almost from the beginning, Confucianism and the
philosophy of Mencius predicated obedience on two-way,
non-totalitarian structures of mutual obligation.
> was due to its geographical situation: mountain barriers did not lead,
> as in Europe, to many separate areas being able to maintain their
> independence, and the country was under a pressing need to be well
> organized to defend against nomadic Mongol invaders from the north.
>
> They weren't *forced* to allow unrestricted technical advance, which
> could undermine the stability of Imperial rule, because they weren't
> in danger of the Mongols coming up with better muskets.
>
This is nonsense since prior to 1750 technical advance, without the
overuse of nonrenewable energy sources, was superior to that of the
West. The abacus is faster for simple business calculation than the
handheld calculator and WAY faster than Peoplesoft, and the abacus
continues to work when the power goes out.
The West defined "technical advance" as the ability to slaughter
people enmasse and as such its zenith, we must conclude, was the
efficiency of Nazi extermination camps.
> A Europe in which the Inquisition could ban the firearm would not have
> been superior to the Europe we have in the real world, and the same is
> true of China. They used gunpowder only in fireworks not because they
> were more civilized and humane, but because that was the use the
> Emperor permitted.
Yeah whatever. Most Chinese, however, don't celebrate the era of armed
warlordism from 1919 to 1949 as some sort of zenith.
Edward G. Nilges
> Té Rowan wrote:
>
> > Saith Corey Murtagh:
> >
> >>Edward G. Nilges wrote:
> >>
> >>>According however, to Clive Ponting (in World History, a New
> >>>Perspective) the only difference between Chinese culture at its zenith
> >>>circa 1750, and Western culture today, is the latter's use of fossil
> >>>fuels, an era that is ending.
> >>
> >>If he truly believed that, then he is every bit as much of a fool as you
> >>are. That's quite an achievement in its own right.
> >
> > We know better. The only difference is that we've got electronics.
>
> Unfortunately there are other differences... like the fact that eddie
> would have been beheaded out of hand by some local lord well before now.
My name isn't "eddie". In a face to face encounter (especially in a
"primitive" society) you'd do me the courtesy of using my proper name.
Furthermore, the savagery here is the savagery of white male America,
and as such it won't due to try to transfer this savagery to cartoon
characters mediated for you by Indiana Jones.
Randy Howard
@yahoo.com says...
> In a face to face encounter (especially in a "primitive" society) you'd
> do me the courtesy of using my proper name.
Why do you insist on tragically underestimating the imagination of those
that might have meet you in person? I rather suspect that quite a
few novel and inventive solutions might spring to mind.
--
Randy Howard
To reply, remove FOOBAR.
Corey Murtagh
I am not an American, eddie. And in a face-to-face encounter I would
give you exactly as much respect as you deserve, which is exactly as
much as I've given you here. But you'd never allow that, would you
eddie. You'd have to face up to someone interrupting your drivel with
constant laughter. You'd have to actually observe the reactions to your
tripe in real-time. You might find out that you're not the impressive
rational being you believe yourself to be.
You probably don't recall, but I gave you the benefit of the doubt once
upon a time. You quickly proved to me that you were not deserving of
/any/ consideration or courtesy. Go look up our earliest interactions
on Google if you don't believe me.
But hey, anytime you're in /my/ home town I'd be happy to prove the
point to you.
Gerry Quinn
> It's one of those inventions like the wheel or steelworking or
> computers; once somebody has invented it, you either adopt it,
> or you get crushed under the wheels of history and forgotten.
You'd have to be slow to get crushed under a heavy object being dragged
along the ground with ropes, that's for sure ;-)
- Gerry Quinn
Té Rowan
>There are soem things about the roman alphabet that sets it out
>among the others: Simplicity and minimalism.
>
>Later alphabets like arab script have a similar simplicity, but that
>has reverted in modern arab. Cyrillic is similar, but is mainly a
>latin adaption to another language family with some different sound
>rules. (disclaimer : I only learnt enough arab and cyrlillic to be
>able to read street signs).
Cyrillic is derived from Greek. I managed to learn enough to read
ships' names, and my second sister still thinks I'm a sorcerer for it.
>Greek have a lot of complexity, especially the pre-Koine (as in
>pre-New Testament) script.
PS: Is it possible to prune the crossposting somewhat?
--
Té Rowan (reyn...@mi.is)
Té Rowan
>Té Rowan wrote:
>
>> Saith Corey Murtagh:
>>
>>>Edward G. Nilges wrote:
>>>
>>>>According however, to Clive Ponting (in World History, a New
>>>>Perspective) the only difference between Chinese culture at its zenith
>>>>circa 1750, and Western culture today, is the latter's use of fossil
>>>>fuels, an era that is ending.
>>>
>>>If he truly believed that, then he is every bit as much of a fool as you
>>>are. That's quite an achievement in its own right.
>>
>> We know better. The only difference is that we've got electronics.
>
>Unfortunately there are other differences... like the fact that eddie
>would have been beheaded out of hand by some local lord well before now.
No. He'd be Pin Hao-Yin and be talking about those worthless savages
west of the effin Han-Hai.
--
Té Rowan (reyn...@mi.is)
Té Rowan
>A Europe in which the Inquisition could ban the firearm would not have
>been superior to the Europe we have in the real world, and the same is
>true of China. They used gunpowder only in fireworks not because they
>were more civilized and humane, but because that was the use the
>Emperor permitted.
Presumably because it's the only decent use of this material. And the
only decent way to fight in a war is with sword, not hand grenades.
--
Té Rowan (reyn...@mi.is)
Sander Vesik
>
> "Harold Rabbie" <hzra...@comcast.net> wrote in message
> > Unicode representation. I refer of course to Chinese characters, which
> can
> > visually represent concepts with a much higher information content per
> pixel
> > than any representation based on alphabets such as Latin (or Sanskrit).
> >
> > Is there any chance that the Anglo-centric technology industry can be
> > persuaded to adopt this or a similar idea?
> >
>
> im wondering what it would cost.
More than the complete GDP of Earth over a long period of time.
--
Sander
+++ Out of cheese error +++
Sander Vesik
> to...@telegraphics.com.au (Toby Thain) wrote in message news:<d6ce4a6c.04061...@posting.google.com>...
> > "Harold Rabbie" <hzra...@comcast.net> wrote in message news:<yNGxc.20020$HG.19151@attbi_s53>...
> > > Isn't it ironic? We in the West pride ourselves on having invented
> > > alphabets, so that a small set of characters can be combined to represent an
> > > unlimited number of concepts. Those poor folks relying on ideograms are
> > > stuck with having to memorize thousands of characters, and continually
> > > invent new ones for new concepts.
>
> "Those poor folks relying on ideograms" such as the Chinese (1)
> invented printing before the West, (2) invented gunpowder, and used it
> for peaceful purposes, before the West, (3) never thought it cute to
> enslave or enserf most of the population so a few bastards could take
> it easy, and (4) until 1750 were more "civilized" than the West.
WHOA! Hold it there! Where did that "never thought it cute to enslave or
enserf most of the population so a few bastards could take it easy" come
from? That certainly has no connection to teh Chinese history on *THIS*
planet.
>
> Even in the 1840s, the West's "industrial revolution" produced
> products too inferior in make for the Chinese to wish to buy their
> "hempen homespun" and the only product the West could vend was opium
> which conveniently locks-in its customer through addiction.
This is nonsense.
A lot of inacuracies and nonsense that followed also got sniped.
grey...@yahoo.com
> wrong but I seem to recall that they are wildly polymorphic,
> to the point that the same "character" can have many different
> appearances which are so dissimilar that they give no hint as
> to the shared identity, or that the flow of phonemes reverses
> direction relative to the writing order inside words according
> to complex rules.
>
> Ligatures, accents, variant forms, reversals, etc... anything
> that complicates the representation of words or multiplies the
> number of character forms available - is a disadvantage
> according to McLuhan's ideal of simple, flexible writing
> systems not getting in the way of how people think.
I remember an article in some magazine in the 1950's that held that
the Russians did not really have an atomic bomb, or have rockets that
would put a man into space, their language was too primitive!.
--
greymaus
Al Firan RumaiDin
97.025% of statistics are wrong
Edward G. Nilges
> In comp.lang.scheme Edward G. Nilges <spino...@yahoo.com> wrote:
> > to...@telegraphics.com.au (Toby Thain) wrote in message news:<d6ce4a6c.04061...@posting.google.com>...
> > > "Harold Rabbie" <hzra...@comcast.net> wrote in message news:<yNGxc.20020$HG.19151@attbi_s53>...
> > > > Isn't it ironic? We in the West pride ourselves on having invented
> > > > alphabets, so that a small set of characters can be combined to represent an
> > > > unlimited number of concepts. Those poor folks relying on ideograms are
> > > > stuck with having to memorize thousands of characters, and continually
> > > > invent new ones for new concepts.
> >
> > "Those poor folks relying on ideograms" such as the Chinese (1)
> > invented printing before the West, (2) invented gunpowder, and used it
> > for peaceful purposes, before the West, (3) never thought it cute to
> > enslave or enserf most of the population so a few bastards could take
> > it easy, and (4) until 1750 were more "civilized" than the West.
>
> WHOA! Hold it there! Where did that "never thought it cute to enslave or
> enserf most of the population so a few bastards could take it easy" come
> from? That certainly has no connection to teh Chinese history on *THIS*
> planet.
Reread the sentence until you understand the key position of "never".
The Romans thought it cute to base an economy on slaves and on the
destuction of the Republic's middle class by increasing property tax
evasion by the wealthy.
Subseqently a majority of the population was enserfed in a raw deal
such that their rights were only guaranteed by the Church.
Today, wealthy and upper-middle class Americans, who are morons,
unconsciously repeat the Roman pattern by evading and repealing
property and income taxes, unconscionably allowing most Americans to
shoulder the tax burden without enjoying any benefits. This will
destroy America.
The key to the Chinese experience was indeed its overall fairness and
recognition that life itself isn't a "game" with "winners" and
"losers". In a very different context there was in other words a
communitarian ethos which created a longer-lived situation.
Corey Murtagh
<snip>
> The key to the Chinese experience was indeed its overall fairness and
> recognition that life itself isn't a "game" with "winners" and
> "losers". In a very different context there was in other words a
> communitarian ethos which created a longer-lived situation.
Oh, so we can ignore all those periods in history when China's
landowners maintained their own private armies and kept the peasants on
their lands at or below subsistence level? Got any idea what the
punishment was during most of those time for a peasant caught leaving
the landowner's property? Sounds /awfully/ like slavery to me.
Do we also assume that the peasant revolts in China were /not/ due to
the terrible conditions they had to endure?
As for 'longer-lived' situation... don't make me laugh. What do you
call the Five Dynasties period? A glitch? Shall we grab a timeline of
the Chinese dynsaties and see how many we can find that lasted less than
20 years?
The fact is that regardless of the motives at the start of each and
every one of those short-lived dynasties, each and every one of them was
overthrown in short order. They were destroyed by military action,
assassination or peasant uprising.
So don't try to kid us that China's had a lovely, fair history. Your
attempts to do so are blatant revisionism.
Randy Howard
says...
> So don't try to kid us that China's had a lovely, fair history. Your
> attempts to do so are blatant revisionism.
worried about getting deported if he doesn't follow the party line. Or,
perhaps he is working for the Chinese equivalent of MI-6 and being paid
to spew such.
:-)
Dennis
"Ray Dillinger" <be...@sonic.net> wrote in message
news:3qBFc.199$54....@typhoon.sonic.net...
> Toby Thain wrote:
>
> You have not misconstrued him; McLuhan believes that alphabetic
> writing systems are clearly superior and foster habits of thought
> that give the cultures who use them substantial advantages over
> any culture that uses a pictographic or heiroglyphic writing
> system. Judging by the evolution of writing systems and literacy
> rates through history, I would have to agree.
>
Superior is such a meaningless word. Superior in what way? I agree that
alphabets have advantages over ideograms. They also have disadvantages.
Are you suggesting that you believe that cultures with alphabetic writing
are superior to the Chinese culture in all respects that are important,
whatever that might mean?
Are you also considering the languages that support these writing systems?
Do you believe that Chinese could convert to an alphabetic system? Do you
believe that it should? Would this alleviate the deficiencies that you
believe exist due to pictographic writing?
Please provide some examples of the superiorities that you recognize.
I believe that you are jumping to this conclusion, without sufficient
understanding.
Dennis
Ray Dillinger
> Please provide some examples of the superiorities that you recognize.
What history shows is that the simpler a writing system is, the
greater the literacy rate societies that use it can achieve and
the earlier the age of proper literacy can be.
That's a pretty powerful benefit in and of itself, in terms of
education; you get to spend time on other things besides memorizing
huge tables of glyphs and practicing them.
Also, the history of heiroglyph and ideogram-using cultures
tends toward stagnation by comparison to alphabet-using
cultures. There are thousands of things that affect the
rate of progress or, sadly, sometimes regress, in a culture,
but alphabets, aside from being easier to learn earlier in
life, allow words for new concepts to be formed without
requiring the sensory memorization for a new heiroglyph,
and don't require a stable/inflexible map of associations
between concepts as do ideograms.
So, it's my personal opinion (and apparently McLuhan's too)
that heiroglyphic and/or ideographic writing systems tend to
foster a resistance to change. It could be one factor among
many; it could even be a coincidence. But coincidence doesn't
seem likely, and history as far as I know it doesn't offer
counterexamples to the idea.
Bear
Alex Shinn
>
> Dennis wrote:
>
> > Please provide some examples of the superiorities that you recognize.
>
> What history shows is that the simpler a writing system is, the
> greater the literacy rate societies that use it can achieve and
> the earlier the age of proper literacy can be.
Japan has arguably the most complicated writing system in the world,
using Chinese characters, two different syllabaries, plus the Latin
alphabet. Though it uses fewer characters than the Chinese (normal use
2000 vs 3000-5000 for Chinese), characters can have multiple readings
(usually 2) and comprise multiple syllables, unlike Chinese which is
consistently one reading, one syllable per character. Yet Japan has a
99% literacy rate, vs. 97% for the United States.
> That's a pretty powerful benefit in and of itself, in terms of
> education; you get to spend time on other things besides memorizing
> huge tables of glyphs and practicing them.
And the average American continues to study spelling and obscure SAT
words throughout high-school. Humans are also very good at memorizing
things - for the Japanese, apparently memorizing all readings and
special cases for 2000 characters isn't enough and they spend most of
their schooling memorizing long lists of facts like historic dates.
> Also, the history of heiroglyph and ideogram-using cultures
> tends toward stagnation by comparison to alphabet-using
> cultures. There are thousands of things that affect the
> rate of progress or, sadly, sometimes regress, in a culture,
> but alphabets, aside from being easier to learn earlier in
> life, allow words for new concepts to be formed without
> requiring the sensory memorization for a new heiroglyph,
> and don't require a stable/inflexible map of associations
> between concepts as do ideograms.
Chinese characters are not inflexible, and you can create new words and
compound words with them (as well as the equivalent of acronyms) just as
you can in other languages. I find that compound words in Japanese are
in many cases more natural than the English equivalents, or can be
constructed where in English you would need to use a longer phrase.
It's true that it would be difficult to write something like
"Jabberwocky" in Chinese or Japanese, but that is an art form, and not
needed to communicate new ideas.
I was watching Japanese TV last night and they had a program where 5
people were seated in a row and, given a question, had to each spell one
character of a 5 character word or phrase to build a complete answer
when read together. One question was "how do you write the English word
'chair' in Latin letters?", and together they spelled out something like
"chere." Another question was "how do you translate NASA into
Japanese?" They got this wrong too, but were closer to the right
answer, and I found it interesting to see that the Japanese equivalent
was only 1 character longer than the English abbreviation, yet was not
an abbreviation and you could exactly understand what it meant from
reading it. Meanwhile I had to struggle to remember what NASA stood for
in English; I feel barraged by too many meaningless acronyms in the
computer age.
> So, it's my personal opinion (and apparently McLuhan's too)
> that heiroglyphic and/or ideographic writing systems tend to
> foster a resistance to change. It could be one factor among
> many; it could even be a coincidence. But coincidence doesn't
> seem likely, and history as far as I know it doesn't offer
> counterexamples to the idea.
There are only two languages still using ideographic writing systems,
and "resistance to change" is a rather vague concept (both countries are
going through a lot of change), so without any clear arguments for cause
and effect I'd have to consider that coincidence.
--
Alex
Dave Hansen
wrote:
[...]
>
>Japan has arguably the most complicated writing system in the world,
>using Chinese characters, two different syllabaries, plus the Latin
>alphabet. Though it uses fewer characters than the Chinese (normal use
>2000 vs 3000-5000 for Chinese), characters can have multiple readings
>(usually 2) and comprise multiple syllables, unlike Chinese which is
>consistently one reading, one syllable per character. Yet Japan has a
>99% literacy rate, vs. 97% for the United States.
I thought (and http://www.kh.rim.or.jp/~nagamura/literacy.html, for
example, backs me up) that the quoted 99% figure includes a fair
number of people who have no functional literacy in kanji. Both
katakana and hiragana are alphabets rather than ideogram systems (like
kanji)
Regards,
-=Dave
--
Change is inevitable, progress is not.
Steve Schafer
wrote:
>And the average American continues to study spelling and obscure SAT
>words throughout high-school. Humans are also very good at memorizing
>things - for the Japanese, apparently memorizing all readings and
>special cases for 2000 characters isn't enough and they spend most of
>their schooling memorizing long lists of facts like historic dates.
And yet, if you walk up to someone in Tokyo, map in hand, and point to a
small town in some far-flung region of Honshu, that person will likely
have no idea how to pronounce the name of that town by looking at the
kanji on the map (personal experience).
Also, I'm not aware of any American high schools in which students
actually study spelling. Increase their vocabulary, yes, but by high
school students are either good at spelling or not, and have memorized
the important exceptions or not, "obscure SAT words" notwithstanding.
Of course, if we're going to talk about languages based on alphabetic
systems, we should look to ones like Spanish or Finnish for more "pure"
examples. I am not fluent in Spanish by any means, but in all my travels
in and readings about Latin America, I have only once come across a
Spanish word ("Spanish" in the sense that it is in a Spanish dictionary)
that didn't follow the rather simple spelling rules of Spanish: cabaret.
Normally, when Spanish borrows words from other languages, the spelling
is changed to reflect Spanish rules (e.g., telephone -> teléfono); for
whatever reason, "cabaret" didn't undergo that transformation.
-Steve
Steve Schafer
wrote:
>And the average American continues to study spelling and obscure SAT
>words throughout high-school. Humans are also very good at memorizing
>things - for the Japanese, apparently memorizing all readings and
>special cases for 2000 characters isn't enough and they spend most of
>their schooling memorizing long lists of facts like historic dates.
And yet, if you walk up to someone in Tokyo, map in hand, and point to a
small town in some far-flung region of Japan, that person will likely
have no idea how to pronounce the name of that town by looking at the
kanji on the map (personal experience).
Also, I'm not aware of any American high schools in which students
actually study spelling. Increase their vocabulary, yes, but by high
school students are either good at spelling or not, and have memorized
the important exceptions or not, "obscure SAT words" notwithstanding.
Of course, if we're going to talk about languages based on alphabetic
systems, we should look to ones like Spanish or Finnish for more "pure"
examples. I am not fluent in Spanish by any means, but in all my travels
in and readings about Latin America, I have only once come across a
Spanish word ("Spanish" in the sense that it is in a Spanish dictionary)
that didn't follow the rather simple spelling rules of Spanish: cabaret.
Normally, when Spanish borrows words from other languages, the spelling
is changed to reflect Spanish rules (e.g., telephone -> teléfono); for
whatever reason, "cabaret" didn't undergo that transformation.
-Steve
[apologies if this is a duplicate--the first try didn't seem to go
through]
Charlie Gibbs
(Ray Dillinger) writes:
>Also, the history of heiroglyph and ideogram-using cultures
>tends toward stagnation by comparison to alphabet-using
>cultures.
If this is true, then our own culture, with its ever-increasing
use of heiroglyphs and ideograms, is in for some trouble.
Not being illiterate, I have difficulty reading this newfangled
ideographic language that's cropping up everywhere. IMHO one of
the stumbling blocks is that - contrary to popular belief - these
recently-created ideograms do _not_ have obvious intrinsic meanings.
Like any other ideograms (Chinese, for instance) their meanings
must be memorized.
On the other hand, I agree that they represent a significant step
away from language discrimination. Rather than text which can't
be understood by non-English speakers, we now have a set of ideograms
which can't be understood by anyone. So at least we're all equal now.
--
/~\ cgi...@kltpzyxm.invalid (Charlie Gibbs)
\ / I'm really at ac.dekanfrus if you read it the right way.
X Top-posted messages will probably be ignored. See RFC1855.
/ \ HTML will DEFINITELY be ignored. Join the ASCII ribbon campaign!
Alex Shinn
>
> I thought (and http://www.kh.rim.or.jp/~nagamura/literacy.html, for
> example, backs me up) that the quoted 99% figure includes a fair
> number of people who have no functional literacy in kanji. Both
> katakana and hiragana are alphabets rather than ideogram systems (like
> kanji)
Setting aside the fact that the article is largely anecdotal, offering
reference to only a single study of military recruits in "pre-war" Japan
(a *very* different country from modern Japan)...
As the article points out, the students are fully literate when they
graduate high school. Learning once is easy, but remembering that
number of characters takes constant use, so people in highly literate
fields will remember the characters throughout their lives, whereas less
academically oriented people (like those who enroll in the military)
fall back on just the characters they actually need. The Japanese
themselves complain that the youth today are remembering fewer kanji,
but that may partly be a self-fulfilling cycle because they have an
alternative in the syllaberies. Forgetting how to write is also
complicated by the fact that everything is done with computers these
days, and the computer will input the kanji for you (my personal writing
is appalling largely due to this). Then again I've seen studies that
say the average "literate" American never reads any books, and would
probably be just as hard pressed to read some more difficult English
vocabulary as the equivalent Japanese would be to read more difficult
kanji.
I really wouldn't presume to know how to measure the literacy rate in
Japan, I was just quoting the CIA world factbook. From all accounts it
seems that 99% of the Japanese are able to attain full literacy, and it
is just in later years that people may forget without use. That says
more about the actual need for literacy in the average person rather
than the ability to attain it. And with respect to the original topic
of whether alphabets are "superior" and allow greater progress, it's not
the average person that furthers progress, but the exceptional person.
--
Alex
Alex Shinn
>
> On Thu, 08 Jul 2004 12:21:26 +0900, Alex Shinn <fo...@synthcode.com>
> wrote:
>
> >And the average American continues to study spelling and obscure SAT
> >words throughout high-school. Humans are also very good at memorizing
> >things - for the Japanese, apparently memorizing all readings and
> >special cases for 2000 characters isn't enough and they spend most of
> >their schooling memorizing long lists of facts like historic dates.
>
> And yet, if you walk up to someone in Tokyo, map in hand, and point to a
> small town in some far-flung region of Honshu, that person will likely
> have no idea how to pronounce the name of that town by looking at the
> kanji on the map (personal experience).
Usually they will know, and if not at least have an idea, much like you
would expect asking an American how to pronounce an obscure English
word. The crazy readings Japanese give characters is no more an
indictment of ideographic systems than English spelling is of alphabets.
In China if the person knows the characters they will know exactly how
to pronounce them.
> Of course, if we're going to talk about languages based on alphabetic
> systems, we should look to ones like Spanish or Finnish for more "pure"
> examples.
The OP's claim was that alphabets are superior to ideographic systems,
with the alleged superiority of the West as evidence. Looking at the
world today the United States is the only superpower so it makes sense
to compare with that. If you want to use Spain as an example then I can
switch my argument and say that ideographic systems are clearly superior
to purely phonetic alphabets because Japan is more advanced than Spain
:) Also the Chinese economy is booming now and many people think it will
soon reach superpower status.
--
Alex
edens morgan mair fheal greykitten tomys des anges
can you sort catalog cards in chinese like you can in english?
i think not
case closed
arf meow arf