On University Challenge (the professionals (The Idler vs the FT; Alex James answered 2 questions one incorrectly, the rest of the time he smiled and had a vague ‘no fucking clue mate’ expression on his face, not like Jarvis Cocker on that Pop Quiz show where he basically answered every question)) the other night there was a question about punctuation. ‘What do the greeks use to denote a question instead of a question mark?’ (the wording was, as usual, impossibly more convoluted and confusing than that, but that was the basic question). The answer? A semi-colon (;). I wonder what programming in C or Java or Actionscript or Perl or any of those other languages which use semi-colons to denote the end of a line/statement must seem like to someone who uses that symbol to denote a question. I wonder if it changes the way you think of programming, like you’re asking the computer if it wouldn’t mind doing something for you if it’s not to busy or anything. My friend Ash told me that Indians were good programmers because the grammar of their language is similar to common computer languages. LR, LL &c.? he didn’t know enough about programming or grammar to be able to tell me, nor was he able to tell me if I, as a programmer, would be able to easily pickup Indian languages. I’m a bit dubious about this, it’s a nice story, but it’s difficult to envisage what a spoken language that’s structured like a computer language might be like, do Indian languages have support for functions?
Sent to me by Emma.