Comment by stew-j | Hacker News Reader

Comment by stew-j | Hacker News Reader

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> I don't believe we should store text as characters

Could you briefly elaborate?

[edit]

I read the article on your HN link. I didn't quite "get it". Program text gets in the way, let's replace it with [?]. Dr. Strandh at U. of Bordeaux, et al., have argued that we shouldn't store programs as text files in an operating system--is that what you are advocating? An image based system, for example?

> none of my work ever gets any interesting comments whenever it does

Sorry for my part in that, most people don't find me interesting. :) My work doesn't get much attention either, even if someone else happens upon it:

https://www.reddit.com/r/Common_Lisp/comments/ezruuc/tovero_...

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I don't know why I keep quoting Shakespeare this week, I mostly slept through the Shakespeare module in high school English, but I guess some filtered through and maybe WRT promotion on the Internet:

"Had I so lavish of my presence been, so common-hackneyed in the eyes of men, so stale and cheap to vulgar company, opinion, that did help me to the crown, had still kept loyal to possession and left me in reputeless banishment, a fellow of no mark nor likelihood." Henry IV, Part 1, Act 3, Scene 2

It seems to me like for the most part only the best connected, ruthless, garrulous, overly vocal people get their ideas heard. I've tried business development orgs (including personal connections), directly contacting relevant researchers or sources of funding, on and on. Mostly, the advice has been to throw the spaghetti on the wall (put up a Github project, e.g.) and see what sticks (yell on Twitter, try to get some users). Even one of the founders of this site had difficulty marketing his idea for a new variant of Lisp, you know.

Yes, I can elaborate: http://verisimilitudes.net/2018-06-06

This is my current progress: http://verisimilitudes.net/2022-06-13

However, that was somewhat a waste of time, so I also wrote this reflection on it: http://verisimilitudes.net/2022-06-17

> Sorry for my part in that, most people don't find me interesting.

I didn't intend the remark as an insult.

It's interesting to mention Shakespeare so much. I'm reading The Merchant of Venice lately.

> It seems to me like for the most part only the best connected, ruthless, garrulous, overly vocal people get their ideas heard.

Yes.

> I've tried business development orgs (including personal connections), directly contacting relevant researchers or sources of funding, on and on.

I tried contacting VPRI and similar organizations, but to silence.

The Internet is an easy target for blame, but in fact in the past month I found a number of people whose thinking (at least on some specific topic) was near to mine through Reddit discussions (and now you, it seems):

https://www.github.com/kaveh808

https://gitlab.com/flatwhatson/guile-prescheme

If you are interested in the nature of machine code and assembly language I would recommend at least looking at Scheme86:

https://dspace.mit.edu/handle/1721.1/6042

It's like a Scheme interpreter running on hardware, and the latest successor to Steele/Sussman's Scheme-on-a-chip--I'm working on microcoding it with my inferior S-assembly. :) I didn't think you were being insulting--my last refuge in an increasingly humorless world appears to be self-deprecating humor.

Have you reached out to John Cowan, who is working on the R7RS Large Scheme standard, and is interested in topics like auxiliary human language as well as computer language and their representation? I'm not serious enough, I'm afraid, for the Scheme community (see above)--but they might take you more seriously:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_W._Cowan

Another Scheme person, Jonathan Rees, was (or still may be) at a forward-thinking institute called "Ronin Institute"--I'm not sure what their process is for onboarding scholars but they might be interested in your work:

https://ronininstitute.org

Elmer Hanks wrote a forward thinking book many years ago called "Enterprises of Great Pith and Moment: A Proposal for a Universal Human Language" (my Shakespeare quote), about his machine readable, sign-language friendly, auxiliary language, and is worth a look in your domain of study.

I have been meaning to re-install Whitaker's Words which I used frequently in my own study of Latin, but lost when I upgraded my OS. You might have heard of Ido, an auxiliary language designed by Louis Couturat, a French logician, and the successor to Esperanto. It's almost completely regular, and I thought it might be a start for a more human-language neutral Scheme implementation (it is a Eurocentric language, so not completely neutral, unfortunately). My middle-school English teacher in 1981 pointed at the Esperanto booth in the language arts faire we took a field trip to and said, "I don't know why that booth is always so disappointingly unattended." I guess "ain't much changed", right?

I recommend "Asimov's Guide to Shakespeare" if you haven't read it:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asimov%27s_Guide_to_Shakespear...

and maybe we should both just continue to choose "to be" rather than "not to be".

[edit]

I was talking this over with my wife, and after reading your links, I still don't completely understand the overall advantage of coding word stems rather than characters. It did remind me of the first computer I owned, a Sinclair ZX-81 I built from a kit. Its Basic keywords, FOR, GOSUB, RETURN were each represented as a bytecode--and I think you could enter with a special key modifier with one key-chord. Is this like what you are saying?

I'm aware of the Scheme chips. I chose machine language because it doesn't need many names for code, and thus was suitable as a starting point for my work on textless programming.

I've not reached out to John Cowan but think I might, despite my dislike of Unicode. I'll also look into this Ronin Institute. I'll keep the book in mind. I appreciate the help.

As I explain in the last linked article, a lot of these artificial languages retard language work, rather than help it. I expect to target real languages with most of my time now.

Think of Elision like MIDI, but for human language. Text is stored uniformly as indices into a dictionary, rather than as a sequence of characters with interspersed control codes.

Thank you for a civil, intelligent conversation.

I had never thought about the "asymmetry" of putting control codes with the character codes in ASCII--it does seem illogical now that you point it out. :) Languages like Ido aren't completely "artificial", and I certainly think Couturat didn't fail in some sense--my irrational issue with Ido, despite its numerous strengths, is that words with the same part of speech end in the same letter(s), making it monotonous. But as my wife pointed out, that regularity makes it easier for computers to parse.

It's no issue.

> I had never thought about the "asymmetry" of putting control codes with the character codes in ASCII--it does seem illogical now that you point it out.

Yes, this is why I call them insidious.

The issue with constructed languages is that they simply don't have the beauty of something such as Latin, and never can, due to their very nature.

Anyway, feel free to send me an e-mail at some point, if we're to continue our discussion at some later time.

> my irrational issue with Ido, despite its numerous strengths, is that words with the same part of speech end in the same letter(s), making it monotonous. But as my wife pointed out, that regularity makes it easier for computers to parse.

For people too. And isn't that exactly how many natural languages work? Verbs -- someone doeS something -- all end with an 's'[1] in English: He/she/it writes, reads, encodes, builds, blathers, creates, excels, triumphs, loses, sucks...

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[1]: Admittedly only in the present tense third-person singular, but that's something. Arguably, more of that would make the language easier to parse and learn.

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