English: The programming language

I hacked together an "English Interpreter", so that you can write a program in "English," and have the computer "understand" it.

You need to write sentences in the proper syntax, and the language is severally limited (no nested loops, or debugging support).
Its got a few example programs that you can copy and paste, or you can just write "instructions" in the box and hit the button to run.

It's written in HTML/Javascript (sorry its not compliant, but maybe once I get around to it), so the webpage is the source code. Watch out, it's a mess.

Let me know what you think.

http://tevlog.com/magic.html

Whats the syntax list for this "English"?

Not anything special. Just another language with different syntax. Something really cool would be to make it a dynamic interpreter with a sort of 'undefined' syntax. That way you could write out what you wanted the program to be and the compiler would make it so. Now, it just has excessively long syntax.

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Originally Posted by cerin

Something really cool would be to make it a dynamic interpreter with a sort of 'undefined' syntax. That way you could write out what you wanted the program to be and the compiler would make it so. Now, it just has excessively long syntax.

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Perl is like this in some ways with the several varieties of almost every keyword.

Hmm perhaps turn it into something useful like a pseudo-code compiler or something ;)

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Originally Posted by SlyMaelstrom

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Originally Posted by cerin

Not anything special. Just another language with different syntax. Something really cool would be to make it a dynamic interpreter with a sort of 'undefined' syntax. That way you could write out what you wanted the program to be and the compiler would make it so. Now, it just has excessively long syntax.

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Perl is like this in some ways with the several varieties of almost every keyword.

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What? You mean interprets what you type? Or has excessively long syntax? :P

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Originally Posted by cerin

What? You mean interprets what you type? Or has excessively long syntax? :P

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The latter, but of course, that is what it would take in order to make a programming language that can properly interpret plain English instructions.

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Originally Posted by cerin

Something really cool would be to make it a dynamic interpreter with a sort of 'undefined' syntax. That way you could write out what you wanted the program to be and the compiler would make it so.

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This exists: it's called declarative programming (more on that here.)

The general idea is this, though: you describe what you want, rather than how to get it (you can think of the code more as a formal proof specifying the result itself, rather than specifying an algorithm that will acheive the result. You go from defining the process of getting from A to B to just defining B.)

I wonder, does part of the definition of a "declarative programming" solution garuantee that a solution is always implemented using the best possible algorithm?