From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 Received: (from weis@localhost) by pauillac.inria.fr (8.7.6/8.7.3) id VAA13352 for caml-red; Wed, 6 Sep 2000 21:40:04 +0200 (MET DST) Received: from nez-perce.inria.fr (nez-perce.inria.fr [192.93.2.78]) by pauillac.inria.fr (8.7.6/8.7.3) with ESMTP id AAA05884 for ; Wed, 6 Sep 2000 00:15:53 +0200 (MET DST) Received: from suburbia.net (suburbia.net [203.4.184.1]) by nez-perce.inria.fr (8.10.0/8.10.0) with ESMTP id e85MFmb02399 for ; Wed, 6 Sep 2000 00:15:49 +0200 (MET DST) Received: by suburbia.net (Postfix, from userid 110) id 6FFBF6C4D3; Wed, 6 Sep 2000 09:15:35 +1100 (EST) To: caml-list@inria.fr, haskell@haskell.org Subject: Programming in Latin Cc: proff@iq.org From: Julian Assange Date: 06 Sep 2000 09:15:35 +1100 Message-ID: MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Sender: weis@pauillac.inria.fr Monash University School of Computer Science and Software Engineering 2000 Clayton campus Seminar Series ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Seminar: Programming in Latin (and Why You Really Might Want To) Speaker: Dr Damian Conway (Damian.Conway@infotech.monash.edu.au), School of Computer Science and Software Engineering, Monash University Date: MONDAY, 11 September 2000 Time: 2:00 pm Venue: Room 135, Computer Science Building (26), Clayton Campus Video Wall at Caulfield Campus Seminar Abstract: English has a comparatively weak lexical structure. Much of the grammatical load of a sentence is carried by positional cues. A statement such as: "The boy gave the dog the food." only makes sense because of the convention that the subject precedes the verb, which precedes the indirect object, which precedes the direct object. Changing the order -- "The food gave the boy the dog." -- changes the meaning. Most programming languages use similar positional grammatical cues. The instruction: maximum = next; is very different in meaning from: next = maximum; Generally speaking, older languages have richer lexical structures (such as inflection for noun number and case) and so rely less on word order. For example, in Latin the sentences "Puer dedit cani escam." and "Escam dedit puer cani." both mean "The boy gave the dog the food." Indeed, the more usual word order would be "Reverse Polish", with the verb coming last: "Puer cani escam dedit." This flexibility is possible because Latin uses inflection to denote lexical roles. There is no reason that programming languages could not also make use of inflection, rather than position, to denote lexical roles. This talk will describe an alternative syntactic binding for the Perl programming language. This binding uses inflections based on classical Latin grammar, rather than positional constraints. No prior knowledge of Latin will be assumed, but by the end of the talk the following program will make perfect sense: 
    maximum inquementum tum biguttam tum stadium egresso scribe.
    vestibulo perlegementum da meo maximo .
    maximum tum novumversum egresso scribe.
    da duo tum maximum conscribementa meis listis.
    dum damentum nexto listis decapitamentum fac sic
        lista sic hoc tum nextum recidementum cis vannementa listis da.
        next tum biguttam tum nextum tum novumversum scribe egresso.
    cis
About The Speaker: Dr Damian Conway is a Senior Lecture in the School of Computer Science and Software Engineering at Monash University. His research interests include: language design, the teaching of programming, object orientation, software engineering, natural language generation, synthetic language generation, morphing, human-computer interaction, geometric modelling, the psychophysics of perception, nanoscale simulation, and parsing. School Contact: Damian Conway (Damian.Conway@infotech.monash.edu.au ) - --------------------------------------------------------------------- A complete list of forthcoming Monash (Clayton) Computer Science and Software Engineering seminars is available from: http://www.csse.monash.edu.au/cgi-bin/seminar?forthcoming Clayton campus parking information is available from: http://www.csse.monash.edu.au/cgi-bin/seminar?parking - --------------------------------------------------------------------- Andrew P. Paplinski (seminar coordinator) (app@csse.monash.edu.au) - --------------------------------------------------------------------- Updated: 05 Sep 2000