--- Greg Ewing <greg.ewing@canterbury.ac.nz> wrote:
suggest that articles (as builtins) are just somehow *wrong* in programming languages. Yet
Steve Howell wrote: they're
so incredible popular in "natural" languages.
Popularity of a given feature in natural languages doesn't necessarily imply optimality -- it could just be a result of those languages having a common ancestor.
Sure, but languages do evolve. Two examples: 1) The more popular words tend to get shortened over time. 2) Languages tend to appropriate only the most expressive words or phrases from other languages.
Linguists have concluded that most of the languages in use today, even ones that seem very different, can be traced back to a single ancestral language.
Same for programming languages to a certain degree. For example, Python has some stuff from C that would arguably not be there if it had been designed in a vacuum, but it traces some of its roots to C. ____________________________________________________________________________________Ready for the edge of your seat? Check out tonight's top picks on Yahoo! TV. http://tv.yahoo.com/