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Communication dans un congrès Année : 2023

When analytic languages were the future of programming

Résumé

In the 1975 paper "Programming languages, natural languages, and mathematics", Peter Naur adopted the linguist Otto Jespersen's teleological view following which, both in natural languages and in programming languages, analyticity — i.e. the idea that each word should contain only one feature and that grammar should only rely on word order — would be the most perfect state, hence the future, of languages. This view fits quite well with history of English and of most Roman languages (Italian, Spanish, Portuguese and French, but not Romanian), which respectively eliminated many morphological features of Germanic and Latin. However, some informal practices as well as technical features of C language and later object-oriented languages reintroduced morphological features in order to improve expressivity. This proved Naur's teleological prediction to be false.
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halshs-04385817, version 1 (10-01-2024)

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  • HAL Id : halshs-04385817 , version 1

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Baptiste Mélès. When analytic languages were the future of programming. Future visions on computing and programming then and now, Liesbeth De Mol, Jun 2023, Lille, France. ⟨halshs-04385817⟩
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Dernière date de mise à jour le 28/04/2024
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