Perligata - write Perl in Latin | Hacker News Reader

Perligata - write Perl in Latin

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53 pointschrismealy12 comments

Mihi cordi est legere de lingua Latina temporibus recentibus reanimata. O tempora, o mores, quibus litterae antiquae flocci aestimantur! Qui sese ad pecuniam adipiscendam vehementer pellunt nullo intervallo excepto, cum ad summam divitiarum demum adveniant, bene vivere non sciunt. Ut ait noster Lucius in Epistulis Moralibus: "Otium sine litteris mors est et hominis vivi sepultura."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Epistulae_morales_ad_Lucilium

"Older natural languages have richer lexical structures (such as inflexions for noun number and case) and therefore rely less on word order. For example, in Latin the statements Puer dedit cani escam and Escam dedit puer cani both mean ``The boy gave the dog the food''. Indeed, the more usual word order would be reverse Polish, with the verb coming last: Puer cani escam dedit.
This flexibility is possible because Latin uses inflexion, not position, to denote lexical roles. The lack of a suffix denotes that the boy (puer) is the subject; the -i ending indicates that the dog (cani) is the indirect object; whilst the -am ending indicates that the food (escam) is the direct object.

To say ``The food gave the boy the dog'', one might write: Puero canem esca dedit. Here, the -o ending denotes that the boy is now the indirect object, the -em ending indicates that the dog has become the direct object, whilst the -a ending indicates that the food is the subject."

Which made me think of the scene in Life of Brian in which the centurion (John Cleese) impersonates a stern Latin teacher. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IIAdHEwiAy8

Much more practical—although less technically interesting—is 中蟒 (pinyin zhōngmǎng) or Chinese Python, which is a translation of a programming language I could actually see people using. It's not as impressive as encoding data types in grammatical gender, though; it consists primarily of translating keywords, method names, &c into Chinese, and Chinese is close enough to English grammatically that none of it seems all that awkward. You can find it at http://www.chinesepython.org/cgi_bin/cgb.cgi/english/english...

Incidentally, Perl also has Lingua::tlhInganHol::yIghun by the same author; it's the same sort of modification, except with Klingon instead of Latin. That is here: http://search.cpan.org/perldoc?Lingua::tlhInganHol::yIghun

What is the point of posting a 10+ year old toy? You could do this same thing in a very wide variety of languages, but since it's useless most people usually don't bother.

Can we get a "2000" on this? :)

Still an amusing little project.

Damien has done crazier stuff; I heard a conference talk and thought "Like seeing Cthulhu, it might be something human minds can't handle!".

Conway has written Parse::RecDescent, the eminent "Best Practices" book (which imho should be mandatory reading for Perl programmers). And so on.

The guy is incredible.

Edit: Updated for clarity. On consideration -- he has done other things, equally crazy. But probably not crazier. :-) Most famous is probably http://search.cpan.org/~dconway/Acme-Bleach/

Hey, if you can't have fun, go join some language community that always vote up language war insults on other communities...

At YAPC 2001 (Montréal), he introduced programming in Klingon. (Yes, it really worked.)

As I recall, it tended to emphasis imperative constructs.

Doesn't really help dispel the notion that Perl is a dead language, does it?

It's not by any mean a dead language, but this submission should be, I don't know why it hasn't been flagged down and deleted.

doesn't really help readability either

As with Perl, your inability to read Latin is not the fault of the language.

That made me laugh. But people doing cool things with Perl are not that interested in public opinion. Perhaps to a fault but I consider it a positive.

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