Subject: Re: lojban as a programming language [was Re: [lojban] Lojban for lay programmers]

From: "Robert J. Chassell" <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 24 Jan 2002 20:05:42 +0000 (UTC)

Okay, quickie - if they're considering Emacs Lisp, they should look at 
Scheme instead. Guile (guile.org) is a nicely embeddable scheme 
interpreter.

Yes -- I agree.

Now, back to lojban. This was something I brought up a couple years 
back - lojban used as a programming language. It especially shines as a 
spoken programming language, because its phonemic structure matches 
lexical structure....

Yes!

No, the tricky part is not parsing lojban - as you point out, the yacc 
grammar does that. The tricky part is the *semantics*. 

Very true.

For example, when evaluating a lojban sentence, do you use strict 
evaluation or lazy evaluation? 

This is where Lojban begins to illuminate programming questions, but
as Tommaso Toffoli says:

... Perhaps its greatest scientific challenge will be not to
confuse the needs and resources of this specialized community with
those of the larger community it addresses.

But we will need to settle these questions. So we will have to
make the choice. Or do it two different ways, initially, and break
the `single meaning' rule.

> (2) able to be used (with a subset of the
> vocabulary, but the same grammar) as a computer scripting language,

Another problem of semantics is choosing the subset of the vocabulary 
and making sure the user knows what it is. Are you going for an 
imperative model? 

Ha! :-) Another good question!

... designing the semantics ... is not as simple as it might first
seem.

Right. But can you think of any other potentially speakable
language, suitable for non-programmers, that is better?

I find it hard to imagine many of my non-computer friends wanting to
learn Scheme, Guile, or Python. 

(It is also hard to imagine them wanting to learn Lojban, but it
seems less hard, since it is a full language and they would have more
motivations to learn it than merely dealing with their computers,
which they hate anyhow.)

-- 
Robert J. Chassell [email-masked]
Rattlesnake Enterprises http://www.rattlesnake.com