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Comment by efaref | Hacker News Reader

Syntax highlighters for natural language would help against garden path sentences:

For example:

    The old man the boat.

... is not ambiguous if written as:

    {SUBJECT}[The old] {VERB}man {OBJECT}[the boat]

I think the reason syntax highlighting is important in programming is because garden-path style sentences are more common with the pedanticly strict grammars that programming languages require.

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The equivalent of garden-path sentences in formal languages would be shift-reduce conflicts and most pedanticly strict grammars are specifically designed to avoid that kind of problem, so that they can be parsed efficiently.

Of course the compiler has no problem understanding them, but humans aren't that good as parsing.

The purpose of a syntax highlighter is so that the human knows that the computer agrees on what the sentence/code structure is.

So you're saying English would be better as a statically typed language /s

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