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Comment by coldtea | Hacker News Reader

>Is there an iterable being acted on? Is this blocking? Is it creating a variable? Two variables? What type is /tmp/test.txt when it has no quotation marks, and how does it handle spaces or concatenation/methods?

Well, if you knew the language, you'd have answer to all of those questions.

Plus, if you didn't know C, you'd be baffled by the other example as well...

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For any reasonably complex example its not at all clear that this is so. Being more english like is actually a hardship not a benefit because naturally language is famously ambiguous and difficult to decode.

Either your language is incredibly complex or it understands a very stilted subset of actual normal language that only happens to look like natural language and you have to remember to use that stilted subset in which case what is the benefit of this vs foo = bar.

Regarding complex language we seem remarkably bad at simple things.

> Being more english like is actually a hardship not a benefit because naturally language is famously ambiguous and difficult to decode

The rules are not any worse to express the exact same operations and relationships. English would need to be augmented to necessarily express the same things. The syntax would change, but thats the point. It doesnt solve anything. Making programs more verbose and approachable is a common theme in scripting languages already. How far is too far?

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