Inflection

i was thinking... could inflection find its way into programming languages?

not that I have any idea what it could be used for.

like

> x is 2. > 2 xes? 4 > 3 xes? 6

of course using plurals for multiplication is stupid... And such language shoudn't be english based. Latin may be, or Turkish.


 * In my mind, the plural of x should be x's. --Ihope127 22:20, 27 May 2006 (UTC)

If the language were object oriented then nouns would be variables reffering to objects.

Genitive case could be use to denote object's fields or methods. Like:

> FOOBAR = CLASS[int x, int y, int z]. > foobar = FOOBAR[1,2,3]. > foobarin x? 1 > foobarin x = 2. > foobar? FOOBAR(2,2,3]

(here "-in" is a genitive ending (one of actual Turkish or Russian genitive endings)).

Need to contemplate this more

Maybe Esperanto-based? --24.191.97.247 21:37, 27 May 2006 (UTC)
 * This would not be very sucessfull, because there are not many inflections for Esperanto (genitive is made with preposition) and only acusative has special ending -n


 * Done - called Espro. :) Timwi (talk) 18:47, 28 September 2015 (UTC)

I found a discussion on Lambda The Ultimate; the comments by nilyab about the correspondence between natural and programming languages reminded me of this page.

If the language is not to be based on English (which might be interesting in view of the LTU discussion, but maybe not esoteric enough here) then I would suggest a strongly agglutinative (because otherwise too many different forms of a word may collapse together or be impossible to connect) case language like Hungarian (giving a new meaning to Hungarian notation). Just imagine a programming language with "free" word order. --Ørjan 16:07, 2 Jun 2006 (UTC)

Hasn't this already been done? Perl can already be used with Latin-like inflections, or isn't that what you meant? --Marinus 12:39, 30 June 2006


 * Nihil sub sole novum. --Ørjan 13:02, 30 Jun 2006 (UTC)

Having just arrived from Wikipedia, I wasn't expecting discussion to be on this page. I left some notes on the "discussion" tab. Rhmccullough 10:43, 28 June 2008 (UTC)