Create Your Own Programming Language

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Hi Adrabi,

I want to write a programming language in plain english. No abbreviations. No slang.
No punctuation.

Ideally find an index of C++ commands and rewrite them in english.

Coding would be like explaining.

Thanks
Philip

Posted 30-Mar-13 1:51am

Philip Smith

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[no name] 30-Mar-13 8:12am

If you are expecting "Adrabi" to just happen by and see this, I think you are going to be in for a disappointment. You would probably want to post this non-question to whatever article you were reading.

3 solutions

Solution 1

Don't post this under Quick Answers - if you were looking at an article, then there is a "new message" button at the bottom of that article, which causes an email to be sent to the author. They are then alerted that you wish to speak to them.
Posting this here relies on them "dropping by" and realising it is for them.

Posted 30-Mar-13 2:21am

OriginalGriff

Solution 3

This was already done in the 1950's, as a goal of enabling managers and supervisors to understand the code that the lowly programmers were writing. The language had some features in it that (besides the syntax) were somewhat unique to that language: decimal numbers, ability to handle currency. Support for decimal numbers is largely why it is still around today. It is a much loathed language nowadays, as anybody doing serious programming uses a language that is more conducive to computer constructs: loops, counters, variables, branches, methods without the "blah blah" overhead of a lot of english words.

Oh yeah, this language was called COBOL. You can read about it here[^].

Posted 30-Mar-13 9:37am

H.Brydon

Updated 30-Mar-13 9:38am

v2

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Manfred Rudolf Bihy 30-Mar-13 16:05pm

Cobol was immediately what I thought of when I read OP's question. :)
+5

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Matthew Faithfull · Accepted Answer · 2013-03-30T04:59:00

Unfortunately this will not work in practise because of a combination of 2 things.

There is as yet no algorithm or software which can accurately parse the whole English language. There is not even any mathematical theory which suggests that it can be completely and accurately parsed by a turing machine ( i.e. non quantum computer )

If you take the novel approach of replacing each form of C++ statement with something equivalent in English then you hit another more subtle issue.
You've now specified one correct way expressing each statement in English but how is the user of your language supposed to know which of the many dozens of ways that English could encode that statement is the one you have chosen.
Many many more forms would be valid English than would be valid in your new language. This would likely cause a lot of user confusion and make your new language very hard to learn, especially as at the end of the day it would still effectively be C++ in terms of it's gramatical and conceptual structure.

There is a rule of thumb for these things that says that if 2 things are differect then they should appear different. If the new language looks like English the user will assume it is English and as it can't be they will be unhappy.

There are however ideas around literate programming which may appeal to you which use advanced features of languages like C++ to make it more like English without it being so similar as to confuse.