--- Jason Orendorff <jason.orendorff@gmail.com> wrote:
Me, previously, on noun phrases:
http://groups.google.com/group/rec.arts.int-fiction/msg/6bdc4b103cafe98f
In that post you said: ''' Noun phrases are the product of a linguistic evolution that was basically finished thousands of years before we were born. The syntax isn't merely interesting. It's the best concrete syntax for the abstract concept it represents. Period. You're not going to beat it. (Well, arguably. My assumption here is that evolution is smarter than engineers, which I think ought not be controversial.) ''' Yes indeed. I was experiencing a similar thought process as I was writing my post. Although you pick out noun phrases as a sort of inevitable evolutionary outcome of human speech optimized on some valid dimension, I was picking up on a different figure of speech, the article. It's amazing how uncommon "the" and "a" are in mainstream programming languages. I'm not saying they should be (although I think there's some argument to using "the" for singletons), I just find it curious that they shouldn't be, and there's been enough evolution on programming languages (albeit a small amount of time compared to natural languages) to suggest that articles (as builtins) are just somehow *wrong* in programming languages. Yet they're so incredible popular in "natural" languages. ____________________________________________________________________________________ Got a little couch potato? Check out fun summer activities for kids. http://search.yahoo.com/search?fr=oni_on_mail&p=summer+activities+for+kids&cs=bz