Language design

[William Ray Wing]

On Sep 18, 2013, at 11:12 AM, Chris Angelico <rosuav at gmail.com> wrote:

> On Thu, Sep 19, 2013 at 1:08 AM, Neil Cerutti <neilc at norwich.edu> wrote:
>> On 2013-09-18, Chris Angelico <rosuav at gmail.com> wrote:
>>> On Thu, Sep 19, 2013 at 12:57 AM, Neil Cerutti <neilc at norwich.edu> wrote:
>>>> There's lots of poetry with significant indentation, though.
>>>> Imbuing the shape of the text on the page with significance is a
>>>> thing.
>>> 
>>> And you can do that with C code, too. Doesn't mean that
>>> indentation is important to C; it means that you're layering
>>> different types of information into a single piece of work.
>>> It's like Perl code drawn in the shape of a camel - a beautiful
>>> hack.
>> 
>> I just meant you can't condense whitespace in a poem and retain
>> all its meaning. It will break certain kinds of quotation styles
>> in publications, as well.
> 
> Sure. I'm still trying to work out if it's possible to deliver a
> verbal speech with fancy information in its written version... English
> is a fun language to tinker with!
> 
> ChrisA
> -- 
> 

Just to add a data point on the importance of formatting in language.  New Testament Greek is/was written with no punctuation, no spaces between words, and no distinction between upper and lower case.  This frequently results in the Greek equivalent of the follow English:  "iamnowhereiameverywhere"  which can be "translated" as either "I am now here, I am everywhere."  _or_ "I am nowhere, I am everywhere."  In other words, two very different meanings.  So, without context or further information, the intent of the original writer can't be inferred.

-Bill