Syntactic conventions

[Gavin Wraith <gavin@...>]

> I have not seen that convention...

Haskell has a convention whereby if a variable x stands for a value of 
a datatype of some kind, then xs stands for a list of such objects.

> I do wish I knew Latin -- it seems to have its root in most languages.

Well, Romance ones anyhow :). But the presence of inflexion in 
Indo-European languages is a question of antiquity. Go back a 
millennium and English was as inflected as Latin.
But I do not think human languages have much to offer programming 
languages, because their semantic structures are usually based on
the physical circumstances of the speaker and the persons addressed. 
Objects are classified by whether they are animate or inanimate, male 
or female, close by the speaker, close by the persons addressed, or 
far away. Indeed, the whole point of programming languages (and 
mathematics) is to be free of the constraints that vernacular 
languages impose.

-- 
Gavin Wraith