Re: Off Topic: live cultures (was: Promoting Lojban)

[Christopher Palmer <reid@pconline.com>]

On Fri, 19 Feb 1999, xod wrote:

> > Show me a language that *doesn't* rely heavily on metaphor, and I'll
> > show you a proglang. :^)
> 
> Every library call is a metaphor.

Not so. Libraries are additions to the 'dictionary' of primitive 
functions; they are lexical, not metaphoric.

The lexicon is built up from primitives not by analogy with
(prog)linguistic extra-(prog)linguistic context, but by the direct logical
consequences of the primitves themselves. Metaphor is inherently tied to
context, and proglangs are by design context-independent.


---------(( Christopher Reid Palmer : www.pconline.com/~reid/ ))---------

              the characters i am, made into a word complete
                              -- Meshuggah