linguistics of transcript?

[Alex Rice]

I studied linguistics in college, as an undergrad, and have always been 
fascinated with how programming languages are used and how they evolve. 
The creator of Perl claims that Perl is close to a natural language in 
a variety of ways and that was one of his design goals. But if you have 
ever had to read Perl code, it is not easy to read at & it's hard to 
believe it's like a natural language. Most unnatural to look at. 
Although I guess that's the point. Once you learn the Perl idiom and 
slang, it makes more sense.

Transcript however seems to be a nice balance of being 
natural-language-like, and with enough strictness to prevent it from 
turning into an idiomatic train wreck like Perl.

Any articles or links out there about the history of 
transcript/metacard/xtalk with respect to it's syntax and linguistic 
issues?

Alex Rice, Software Developer
Architectural Research Consultants, Inc.
alrice at swcp.com
alex_rice at arc.to