Re: New symbolic/numeric/dynamic/intuitive programming language

From: "Mark Nudelman" <ma...@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
This seems like an instance of the COBOL school of language
design, the philosophy being that the closer a program looks to
ordinary English, the better it is.

COBOL actually had at least one good idea: PICture clauses.
In COBOL's formative years, 80-column Hollerith cards, with all
data laid out in fixed columns, were the standard for input and output.
Even printed reports used fixed format.
When a data layout was specified once, it could be used both to
parse incoming data and to generate outgoing data in the same
format. The modern equivalent for variable-length fields with
nested structure would be BNF. (The more popular regular
expressions, aren't powerful enough, IMO.) I haven't seen any
programming language that directly used BNF for its standard way to
specify input/output parsing/formatting, which I see as a
deficiency in *all* programming languages to date.

So, here's a task for the "English-like" folks: Try to find an
English-like syntax for expressing BNF, then incorporate it into a
modern programming language. Here's a strawman starting idea:
A WFF can be a 'p' or 'q' or 'r' or 's',
or an 'N' followed by a WFF,
or (a 'C' or "A" or 'K' or 'E') followed by two WFFs.
(That idea is not original with me. Shake-a-WFF was a fun lively game!)
.

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