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      Welcome!   03/05/2016

      Welcome, everyone, to the new 910CMX Community Forums. I'm still working on getting them running, so things may change.  If you're a 910 Comic creator and need your forum recreated, let me know and I'll get on it right away.  I'll do my best to make this new place as fun as the last one!
Stature

Story Monday March 28, 2016

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6 hours ago, Matoyak said:
10 hours ago, hkmaly said:

Which programming language is absolutely rigid? At least some programming languages directly say what version of specifications they are supposed to be compiled with.

In a programming language you can't suddenly decide to change the meaning of a key word. You can't change what the language considers as a scope limiter. They're ALL rigid in that you have to conform to the language specifications, or if you wish not to, then create a new version of the language / a new language outright. You can't just decide that the keyword "final" means "ironically final" or "actually first" (like for example what happened with "literally" or "awful" in English). You'd have to change the language definitions itself, and it would be a conscious, explicit change, which is not close to normal for how spoken and written languages change.

You say they are rigid, but you speak about the fact that they change in discrete steps (called "versions"), whereas spoken languages changes continuously. (Also, yes, in most languages the change is more explicit.)

5 hours ago, HarJIT said:

On that topic, on a UNIX system, for example there's the small matter of cat, which is named for its ability to concatenate multiple files into a singular stream, but which is mostly used for outputting singular files to stdout (literally, it concatenates a list of files of length 1 and outputs the result, which amounts to outputting a file to stdout).

... and in most cases, the cat is completely superfluous, as the thing you pipe it's output to is already capable of reading files.

 

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5 hours ago, hkmaly said:

You say they are rigid, but you speak about the fact that they change in discrete steps (called "versions"), whereas spoken languages changes continuously. (Also, yes, in most languages the change is more explicit.)

Uh-huh...? I'm very uncertain as to your point. Rigid doesn't mean "unchanging over time", it means "not flexible".

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19 hours ago, Matoyak said:
On 03/30/2016 at 1:06 AM, hkmaly said:

You say they are rigid, but you speak about the fact that they change in discrete steps (called "versions"), whereas spoken languages changes continuously. (Also, yes, in most languages the change is more explicit.)

Uh-huh...? I'm very uncertain as to your point. Rigid doesn't mean "unchanging over time", it means "not flexible".

Uh? Sure, English is not my first language, but I'm also uncertain as to your point. Based on wikipedia (also some dictionary, but those are less reliable), a rigid body is an idealization of a solid body in which deformation is neglected. In other words, the distance between any two given points of a rigid body remains constant in time regardless of external forces exerted on it. Which also sounds as "not flexible".

Anyway, if your point is that rigid means "more rigid" instead of "totally rigid" or something like that, then read my post as trying to be more specific instead of disagreement. Sure, MOST programming languages are changing slower than spoken languages, but the important part of difference isn't the speed, it's the fact that spoken languages change continuously, while programming languages changes in discrete steps (or sometimes jumps). And, usually in centralized way (there may be more that one centre, but spoken languages don't have ANY). And as already mentioned, explicitly.

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There is a degree of flexibility in how a single discrete version of a spoken language can be interpreted. two people who speak the same dialect of the same language can have differing views on what a phrase means. or the same phrase can have multiple meanings to the same person based on context. Slang terms, double meanings, sarcasm, puns, euphemisms, metaphors, innuendo, etc. they're all examples of this.

there is no flexibility in how a single discreet version of a coding language can be interpreted. Machines running the same version of their base code and software should interpret a given subroutine exactly the same way.

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22 hours ago, InfiniteRemnant said:

There is a degree of flexibility in how a single discrete version of a spoken language can be interpreted. two people who speak the same dialect of the same language can have differing views on what a phrase means. or the same phrase can have multiple meanings to the same person based on context. Slang terms, double meanings, sarcasm, puns, euphemisms, metaphors, innuendo, etc. they're all examples of this.

there is no flexibility in how a single discreet version of a coding language can be interpreted. Machines running the same version of their base code and software should interpret a given subroutine exactly the same way.

Requiring same version of "base code and software" is much stricter than the "same dialect" one - and still, there are bugs proving it is not always the case.

On the other hand, those are BUGS. It's not deliberate, the coding languages are not SUPPOSED to work that way. And opinion of some language pundits notwithstanding, the spoken language ARE supposed to work that way. If you try to describe version of spoken language as strictly as a programming language is usually described, you will end up with language versions spoken by three people. Wait, one just diverged.

But note that tone (which specifies sarcasm) is part of language and slangs are different versions (dialects). Best examples for something with different views are sentences like they saw a girl with binocullars - those are hard to parse correctly even WITH context.

Nevertheless, if this is what Matoyak talked about, he didn't explained it clearly.

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1 hour ago, hkmaly said:

Requiring same version of "base code and software" is much stricter than the "same dialect" one - and still, there are bugs proving it is not always the case.

On the other hand, those are BUGS. It's not deliberate, the coding languages are not SUPPOSED to work that way. And opinion of some language pundits notwithstanding, the spoken language ARE supposed to work that way. If you try to describe version of spoken language as strictly as a programming language is usually described, you will end up with language versions spoken by three people. Wait, one just diverged.

But note that tone (which specifies sarcasm) is part of language and slangs are different versions (dialects). Best examples for something with different views are sentences like they saw a girl with binocullars - those are hard to parse correctly even WITH context.

Nevertheless, if this is what Matoyak talked about, he didn't explained it clearly.

I still haven't been able to figure out what you're saying, so I can't say one way or another whether that's what I was trying to say.

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