Real Men use Lojban (fnord)

[Ben Scott]

<POINTLESS>

On 11/14/06, aluminumsulfate at earthlink.net
<aluminumsulfate at earthlink.net> wrote:
>>   What XML gives you is a standard way to define the structure,
>> schema, and so on, in a way that is unambiguous and machine-friendly.
>
> Hm. "unambiguous" and "machine-friendly".  Lojban, which is formally
> defined by a yacc grammar, meets both these criteria.

  Not "standard", though.

  "Standard", in this case, meaning "has a snowball's chance in a
supernova of having someone else using it", not "written down
somewhere".

> There's a standard parser for the Lojban language, too.  And since a
> spoken language can represent pretty much anything humanly
> experienceable, there's no doubt that it can represent any computer
> data the programmer chooses.

  Perhaps, but perhaps not well.  I expect it would be ugly putting,
say, JPEG data into Lojban.  Sure, you could do it, as a sequence of
numbers written/spoken in the language, but it's not very pretty.  XML
is somewhat less ugly.  (Never thought I'd say that.)

> No need to document data structures or their meanings---because the data structure
> is a spoken language itself.

  Um.  Yah.  Just like declaring variables in a C program eliminates
the need for comments.

> Ontologies, standards, and parsing aside, Lojban is easier for humans
> to author/edit than XML ...

  I rather think XML in one's native tongue will always be easier than
Lojban (excepting the currently hypothetical case of Lojban being
one's native tongue).

> ... and can be spoken aloud.  Try doing that with XML!

  Open ach tee em ell close open body close open tee one close oh pee
ee en open slash tee one close ...

  Who is to say that is any more or less ugly that "la fus. se skari
lo blanu" or whatever?

  Slightly more verbose, I suppose.

> For those curious ...

  Short list.

</POINTLESS>

-- Ben