[gentoo-user] Re: What is a "packet"? Was: Checksum error

[Grant Edwards]

On 2009-10-12, Alan McKinnon <alan.mckinnon@×××××.com> wrote:

> The subjective|objective case means the form of the word
> changes depending if it's the subject or object in the
> sentence. English does this with word position.

Pretty much only the personal pronouns have retained different
objective/subjective cases (I/me, he/him, she/her, who/whom,
we/us, they/them).  Thee/thou were only recently been replaced
by "you" for both singular objective and subjective in very
formal english writing. Since English has evolved to primarily
use position to determine subject/object relationships, having
different noun cases is redundant.  The nominative plural "ye"
has also gone away and been subsumed by "you", however there is
actualy information loss there, since there is no positional
way to distinguish between the singular and plural "you".  Of
course in the southern US, the singular is "you" and plural is
"you all" or "y'll". Except for people who use "y'all" as
singular and "all y'all" as plural.

> "The boy kicked the ball." The subject is boy and the only way
> to tell is the it's before the verb. Which is a stupid idea
> actually.

It's probably just a result of my having grown up with a
positional verses notational language (is notational the right
word?), but the positional syntax seems a lot simpler to me.

IIRC, many of the changes in English as it evovled from its
Germanic roots have come from it being learned by a succession
of "invaders" (Vikings, Normans, etc.). That generally results
in the simplification of a language's grammar and syntax but an
odd admixture of actual words.  For a good example of the
latter, the words for an animal and the culinary name for the
flesh don't match up in English.  The animal is referred to by
the older English word (pig, cow, calf, sheep, deer), but what
you eat is referred to by the French words that came in with
the Normans (pork, beef, veal, mutton, venison).  The people
that dealt with the animals were peasants who spoke English.
The people that ate the flesh were Normans who spoke French.

> You should be able to modify "ball" to show that it's indeed
> the object.

That seems to be an entirely "subjective" value judgement.  Why
should one be able to do that?  [Good pun, eh?]

> Then you could do this: "ball the boy kicked" which emphasises
> that it's the ball that was kicked.

I give up, why doesn't "the ball the boy kicked" work?

> [English has a few cases of this, I learned them 30 years ago
> and completely forget all examples right now].
>
> The only way to do this last in English is to say "the ball
> was kicked by the boy" which is a completely different
> sentence altogether (change of voice). Or you could use this
> horrible horrible hack: "the boy kicked the ball (and I
> should point out that it is indeed the ball he kicked and not
> the dog)"
>
> Like I said earlier in this thread, if English were a coding
> language it would be BrainFuck or intercal

Don't pretty much all programming languages use position to
differente the meanings of references to variables?

For example, in an assignment statement, the position of the
two names is significant in all programming languages I can
think of: i := j is never the same as j := i.  You don't modify
the variable names to show whether it's the target of an
assignment or a reference.  Except I guess in shel-like
languages (e.g. Perl), where you have to use a prefix
"dereference" operator to disambiguate between variable
references and string literals.

Are there any programming languages that use positionally
independent notation?  The only thing I can think of is named
parameters:

     funcname(paramA = 1234.5, paramB = "asdf")

Even in that example, the position of the funcname is
significant, as is the position of the parameter names/values
in relation to the "=" operator).

It's the same in mathematics for many/most operators i - j and
j - i aren't the same thing.  The position of the variable
relative to the operator tells you want's going on.  While a +
b is equal to b + a, that's a property of the particular
operator. 

OK, this is waaay off topic now...

-- 
Grant Edwards                   grante             Yow! Hello.  I know
                                  at               the divorce rate among
                               visi.com            unmarried Catholic Alaskan
                                                   females!!