Re: The Oxford Comma - A Gift Worth Atleast 5 Cents

>>>>> "ac" == ac  <ac@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> writes:


    ac> and that, although English is not the worse, human languages
    ac> have relatively little to do with logic and structure since
    ac> they are built from arbitrary usage and tradition, not
    ac> structure and logic (although some have tried).  Esperanto is
    ac> the best. Yet, as some have proposed, its accented letters
    ac> could easily be replaced with unaccented letters, making
    ac> digital life easier for users, if it was not for the Esperanto
    ac> tradition ...

You are talking about orthography here, not language.
Natural languages tend to have a lot to do with logic (the logic of
communication). 

    ac> Programming languages always carry quite a bit of tradition
    ac> also but at least, they usually have some structure and logic.

But the logic has a different basis - fundamentally, they must be
parsed in a non-ambiguous way - humans can cope, and even delight in
(puns) ambiguity in the language. This is very much harder for
computer-language parsers.

    ac> Standardized and XML-based, XSLT (2) is quite nice to process
    ac> and transform, at least relatively to most other languages.

But it's not nearly so nice to read, because of the XML syntax.
-- 
Colin Adams
Preston Lancashire