bradrn

IIRC Navajo has a pretty robust noun-verb distinction. However there definitely are other languages where nouns and verbs behave very similarly, e.g. most famously Salishan languages. That said, there don’t seem to be any natural languages in which nouns and verbs are completely indistinguishable — there’s always some minor difference in how they behave.

> Just use optparse-applicative in PureScript.

Or in Haskell!

But isn’t it sort of the whole point of Smalltalk that the IDE and the code run at the same time in the same place?

See also: https://www.amber-lang.net/

> Thankfully, in GHC 7.4.1 was introduced the record syntax, which allows naming fields, like this […]

What on Earth? Record syntax has been around since the very first versions of Haskell. This is a surprisingly blatant error to see so near the beginning of this article…

Apparently, yes: https://muratkasimov.art/Ya/Operators

Er… this may be a stupid question, but how is this actually different to ordinary floating-point arithmetic? Ordinary IEEE-754 floating-point numbers already store the mantissa and exponent in separate fields, don’t they?

No, see previous discussion here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44632819

> It actually peaks between magenta and blue

No, it actually peaks wherever you want it to peak, depending on how you plot it: https://www.oceanopticsbook.info/view/light-and-radiometry/l...

Technically those aren’t macros; they’re what the Lisp world calls ‘fexprs’.

Along similar lines, the calligraphy here is quite impressive: https://www.reddit.com/r/language/comments/1gmzro8/what_scri...

Both eruvim have their own dedicated physical wires, yes.

> accusations of anti-semitism (whether warranted or not is a matter of opinion)

I live within the St Ives eruv. At least some of the opposition was unquestionably antisemitic — I recall receiving at least one antisemitic screed in our mailbox during the time of the council debate. (That one went something along the lines of ‘the Jews are trying to kick out all the non-Jews’ etc. etc., for two pages of fairly small text.)

Not at all. The Jewish perspective is essentially that Jewish law stems from the creation of an all-knowing God, and therefore any seeming ‘loopholes’ must not only be known to Him but explicitly intended to exist. On this basis, it must be perfectly valid to use them!

> Sign language […] does have something map-like that the author writes about.

Not really, no. Sign languages have basically the same structure as spoken languages. (Exceptions are fairly minor, e.g. the use of space for anaphora in ASL.)

> That the language does not have written form is not helping.

Again, no. There are a number of well-established sign language writing systems, including SignWriting [0] and Stokoe Notation [1].

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SignWriting

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stokoe_notation

If I understand correctly, this is the same as the default behaviour for Emacs (on top of which Undo Tree is implemented).

Also Io, to some extent: https://iolanguage.org/guide/guide.html#Importing

The point being made in that file is really that, if you take the SI definitions literally, 'cycles' and 'radians' end up both being dimensionless and equal to 1, which is stupid.

> as a native speaker, I can't even decide if that should be "first vowel in these is" or "first vowels in these are" or what I actually wrote above which is what seems more natural to me, although immediately stood out to me as grammatically inconsistent when I re-read it after posting...

I would say that the former (“first vowel in these is”) is ‘more correct’, but it sounds weird because it contains the plural “these” immediately before the singular “is”. What you actually wrote is inconsistent strictly speaking, but it feels better because the verb agrees with the immediately preceding word. (This kind of thing is rather common in languages with agreement.)

As someone doing research in physics, I’ve noticed this usage before. It seems fairly frequent outside CS [EDIT: and as the sibling comment says, specifically in numerical computing]. From what I’ve gathered, for them ‘code’ has become a count noun, such that ‘a code’ means something like ‘a piece of code’ or even ‘a program’, and the plural ‘codes’ follows from that.

I see an image on that page…?

Hackage has a categories system which can be used to browse through all Haskell packages [0]. Unfortunately the categories are unstandardised, so it’s less useful than it could be — though the Flora project exists, which has improved the UI by standardising categories a bit [1].

[0] https://hackage.haskell.org/packages/

[1] https://flora.pm/categories

> I believe that it is still practiced in Iraq and Syria

And Iran, but especially in India: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zoroastrianism_in_India

A bit of searching turned up this, on a discussion between the author of that paper and a critic: https://www.reddit.com/r/IndianHistory/comments/1iekde1/fina...

I think for ‘Scottish Garlic’ you meant ‘Scottish Gaelic’…

Well, ‘is’ isn’t quite the right word… but they’re all closely related languages, yes, which is why I mentioned it.

I say this as a native English speaker… but I speak South African English (or something similar), and I’ve heard that this expression is due to Afrikaans influence!

Yes, fixes.

Meanwhile I always liked this one, even though it’s not specifically focussed on mathematics: https://foundalis.com/lan/hw/grkhandw.htm

Actually, this reminds me very strongly of Rebol [0] and related languages (e.g. Red [1]). They work as you describe at the end: whenever a function is encountered, the interpreter inspects the following arguments, without any need for parentheses. Since these languages are homoiconic like Lisp, it’s possible to use functions as if they were macros (achieving it at runtime using a rather strange ‘binding’ system).

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rebol

[1] https://www.red-lang.org/

How nice to see this here! When I first got interested in language creation, the LCK was one of the first books I read (followed shortly by Mark/zompist’s other books on linguistics and worldbuilding). It is an excellent introduction to conlanging — as well as to the whole field of linguistics, in fact. I recommend it without hesitation to anyone who is interested in making their own language.