June 22, 2007
1:12 a.m.
Steve Howell wrote:
suggest that articles (as builtins) are just somehow *wrong* in programming languages. Yet 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. 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. -- Greg