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P*rl in Latin, whither Python?

Alex Martelli aleaxit at yahoo.com
Sat Nov 11 06:49:08 EST 2000 
"Suchandra Thapa" <ssthapa at harper.uchicago.edu> wrote in message
news:slrn90o5ek.3lu.ssthapa at localhost.localdomain...
    [snip]
> perligata follow latin's substitution of i, and v for j and u
respectively,
> not allowing  k since roman's didn't have j, u, w, or k in their alphabet?
Also

Actually, the emperor Claudius (a scholar, before events propelled
him to the purple) introduced the letter 'u' (he claimed that using 'v'
for it, an old convention, had no connection any more with current
pronunciation of the two sounds; spelling/pronunciation
correspondence was quite important to Latin scholars), though it
took a while to be fully accepted.

> whether verbs are properly conjugated or nouns declined (verbs have ~60-70
> forms, the one used depends on the subject, the tense, whether the verb is

Read the paper -- it simplifies this (and various irregularities) a lot,
while keeping the basic idea that words' inflections, not word order,
are the key of the syntax.  (Existing programming languages can be
taken as similarly-drastic simplifications of word-order-based syntax).


Alex
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