Re: C question for you old guys ;-)
Re: C question for you old guys ;-)
- Subject: Re: C question for you old guys ;-)
- From: Wade Tregaskis <email@hidden>
- Date: Thu, 12 Jun 2003 13:38:16 +1000
The colour of the sky is blue
but you will note that:
Blue is the colour of the sky
doesn't sound wrong - to me anyway, or am I just screwy?
English & American speakers tend to put the object earlier in the
sentence, rather than it's property (can you tell I'm a programmer, and
not a ... a.. Englishtarian? :).
Many languages do the opposite - Indonesian springs to mind - in that
they like to refer to the specifics before getting to the more general
relations.
There are arguments both ways, although something as simple as this
could tie up a whole host of research psychologists. The first form, I
believe, is supposed to allow you to follow a 'natural' categorical
thought pattern - you start with your real world superclass, 'object',
and work down it's subclasses 'world' -> 'sky', then pick the property.
This supposedly imitates your memory's natural behaviour (although,
then again, there's a lot of established research which goes very much
against this memory behaviour).
The latter form, object last, is supposed to improve conversational
communication, because you already have a context to work in, so by
half way through the sentence you can deduce the rest anyway. My
personal thought is that this reflects in how quick people speaking
such languages seem to be able to communicate.
But then, English has so many context-sensitives anyway, it probably
makes up for this in it's own complicated way.
Ultimately, I'd say the literal before variable approach seems
unnatural because you're used (as English or American speakers) to
knowing what you're talking about, before you start thinking about the
details (like what value it is). Allocating temporary storage for the
value, while you await a context, runs contrary to our basic habits.
Then again, I've been writing an LMC compiler lately, and chronological
ordering like this seems ridiculously simple in comparison. :)
Wade Tregaskis
P.S. Anyone else seen Apple's spell checker underline a word, so you
change a vowel or something, but it still says it's wrong... so you
bring up the menu for it, and it tells you spell it the way you had it
originally, where it also said it was wrong? I've seen it twice now in
this email alone.
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