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Re: reading and writing, was A Plain English Compiler

From Stefan Monnier <monnier@iro.umontreal.ca>
Newsgroups comp.compilers
Subject Re: reading and writing, was A Plain English Compiler
Date 2014-10-28 17:37 -0400
Organization A noiseless patient Spider
Message-ID <14-10-014@comp.compilers> (permalink)
References (1 earlier) <06-02-125@comp.compilers> <14-10-005@comp.compilers> <14-10-008@comp.compilers> <14-10-009@comp.compilers> <14-10-010@comp.compilers>

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> Re COBOL, I am fairly sure that the point of making it look like stilted
> English was not that they'd thought it'd make it easier to program, but
> that it'd be possible for non-programmers, e.g. auditors, to look at the
> code and figure out what it did. -John]

I think the better solution to this problem, nowadays, would be to
transliterate the source code into plain-english.

This has been done fairly successfully for formal proof in proof
assistants, so I assume it shouldn't be too hard to do for your average
programming language, tho maybe it might be useful/necessary to tweak
the source language to make the transliteration more readable.


        Stefan
[I wouldn't disagree, but do remember that COBOL was designed over 50 years ago. -John]

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Re: A Plain English Compiler gerry.rzeppa@pobox.com - 2014-10-24 16:33 -0700
  Re: A Plain English Compiler lesliedellow@gmail.com - 2014-10-25 06:01 -0700
    Re: A Plain English Compiler "Derek M. Jones" <derek@knosof.co.uk> - 2014-10-25 19:51 +0100
    Re: A Plain English Compiler "Gerry Rzeppa" <gerry.rzeppa@pobox.com> - 2014-10-30 14:53 -0500
  Re: A Plain English Compiler Martin Ward <martin@gkc.org.uk> - 2014-10-27 11:54 +0000
    Re: A Plain English Compiler Kartik Agaram <ak@akkartik.com> - 2014-10-27 12:25 -0700
      Re: A Plain English Compiler Kaz Kylheku <kaz@kylheku.com> - 2014-10-27 21:45 +0000
        Re: reading and writing, was A Plain English Compiler Stefan Monnier <monnier@iro.umontreal.ca> - 2014-10-28 17:37 -0400
        Re: A Plain English Compiler Hans-Peter Diettrich <DrDiettrich1@netscape.net> - 2014-10-29 01:28 +0100
          Fw: A Plain English Compiler "Gerry Rzeppa" <gerry.rzeppa@pobox.com> - 2014-10-30 04:02 -0500
        Re: A Plain English Compiler mac <acolvin@efunct.com> - 2014-11-03 13:15 +0000
      Re: A Plain English Compiler Ivan Godard <ivan@ootbcomp.com> - 2014-10-27 15:07 -0700
      Re: A Plain English Compiler Martin Ward <martin@gkc.org.uk> - 2014-10-28 15:14 +0000
        Re: A Plain English Compiler Stefan Monnier <monnier@iro.umontreal.ca> - 2014-10-28 17:33 -0400
        Re: A Plain English Compiler "Gerry Rzeppa" <gerry.rzeppa@pobox.com> - 2014-10-30 17:05 -0500
          Re: A Plain English Compiler "Gerry Rzeppa" <gerry.rzeppa@pobox.com> - 2014-10-31 01:05 -0500
            Re: A Plain English Compiler "Gerry Rzeppa" <gerry.rzeppa@pobox.com> - 2014-10-31 21:22 -0500
      Fw: A Plain English Compiler "Gerry Rzeppa" <gerry.rzeppa@pobox.com> - 2014-10-30 04:01 -0500

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