Hallo conlangers!

On Saturday 05 January 2013 12:13:43 R A Brown wrote:

> On 04/01/2013 22:02, Jörg Rhiemeier wrote:
> > Hallo conlangers!
> [...]
> > There really is no need to repeat those lengthy threads
> > again, though for different reasons than what And
> > assumes to be ;)
> 
> Yes, indeed - and I will keep my reply short for that reason.

Sure.  There is not much to say on this matter any more.
 
> [...]
> 
> > I am completely lost in And's example ;)
> 
> Me too - in any case, as far as I can see, it has nothing
> whatever to do with RPN.

Indeed not!
 
> [snip]
> 
> >>> "Stack-based languages" in your extended sense are
> >>> indeed not naturalistic, and indeed aren't even
> >>> languages, but because of the syntaxlessness, not
> >>> the stack-basedness.
> >> 
> >> Why is "5 2 -" syntaxless?
> > 
> > It can't be syntaxless when a reordering changes the
> > meaning: _2 5 -_ gives a different result, and _5 - 2_
> > gives again a different result which even depends on
> > what is currently on the stack, or a syntax error if the
> > stack is empty ;)
> 
> Exactly!! I really do not understand what And is on about
> with all this "syntaxless" business.  Of course both PN and
> RPN must have syntax, particularly with regard to the
> subtraction and dividing operators!

Surely, an RPN language has a syntax, even if it is one that can
be parsed very efficiently by von Neumann machines.  But I have
a hunch that such a syntax is too simple to cope with the
complexity necessary for a language with the same expressive
power as a human language.  As I have observed yesterday, I'd
expect Fith to break down when it comes to translating long,
sophisticated literary texts.  Talking with people is just not
the same as giving orders to a computer.  Confusing the two
vastly overestimates what computers can do, and underestimates
what it means to be sapient.  But I have met many IT nerds in
my life who indeed get this wrong ;)

On Saturday 05 January 2013 15:09:19 R A Brown wrote:

> On 05/01/2013 09:26, Elena ``of Valhalla'' wrote:
> [snip]
> 
> > Don't you need lots of short-term memory to parse
> > complex SOV sentences such as those common in *literary*
> > German?
> 
> Those long Ciceronian-type periods! Not sure how fluent
> German readers do it     :-)

They balk at too complex constructions ;)  There *are* things
that are syntactically correct in theory but overload one's
short-term memory in practice.
 
> [...]
> 
> If anything goes on in the human brain analogous to anything
> that goes on in a Von Neumann machine, it is surely more
> likely to be tree structures (or even neural _networks_).

Yep.
 
> [snip]
> 
> > the stack of an RPN *programming language* interpreter
> > can hold list of expressions (used to define functions,
> > for conditional clauses, etc.)
> 
> Yep - there's an interesting article about real stack-based
> or, more properly, stack-oriented languages here:
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stack-oriented_programming_language
> 
> But while, because of the limitations of the Von Neumann
> architecture of (home) computers, stack oriented processing
> is very convenient, there's no reason to suppose that the
> human brain, which has evolved over zillions of years, is so
> limited.

Indeed there isn't.  I fancy that the human mind is actually a
*quantum* information system of some kind, but I admit that this
idea is sheer speculation.  But I seriously doubt that it is a
von Neumann machine!

--
... brought to you by the Weeping Elf
http://www.joerg-rhiemeier.de/Conlang/index.html
"Bêsel asa Éam, a Éam atha cvanthal a cvanth atha Éamal." - SiM 1:1