OT: Is there a more English-like Programming language than Transcript?

David Bovill david at openpartnership.net
Thu Aug 10 18:13:51 EDT 2006


By the way is Transcript still the official term for Revs programming
language?

Spent an hour looking for links references and articles on English-like
programming languages - looking at the syntax. Found no good links yet. Lots
of stuff about COBOL, things about how it was the flavour of the month in
the 80's - how good perl is. Here is a nice quote from
http://www.whynot.net/ideas/1441:

    By this, I mean the source file would be something like a text file..
and the interpreter would interpret the english language commands and build
a program based on it. The commands for the English Programming Language
could be something like this (consider this a raw source file):

    <begin source>
>
>     First, create a window approximately 75% of the screen size. Then, add
> two menus to the top, one File and one Help. Under the File menu, add Exit.
> When a user clicks on Exit, the program should exit. Under the help menu,
> add a simple About option that describes this program.
>
>     Now create two buttons in the main window (the first one). The first
> button should say "Message", and the second one should say "Exit" (without
> the quotes). When a user clicks on Message, a message box should pop up
> saying "Hello, World!". When the user clicks on the Exit button, the program
> should exit.
>
>     <end source>
>

Now that would be more English-like than Transcript, but to date i cannot
find anything much more English-like than the syntax of Transcript. There is
some AI stuff like -
http://www.softwaretheories.com/Examples/index.html(not a good link) -
and Ruslan you there - some older links I had for
parsers that took XML - there is an MIT project to create a meta language...
but no good links I can find - and certainly nothing solid and useable.

So the question is this - is Transcipt the best real programming language
out there in terms of it's English-likeness! That is the ease in which a
non-programmer, or non-speaker of the computer language can understand it?

Help, links, rants and gossip appreciated!



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