On Mon, Jun 20, 2005 at 05:34:08PM +0200, Wolfgang Jeltsch wrote:
Am Montag, 20. Juni 2005 16:36 schrieben Sie:
Wolfgang Jeltsch <wolfgang@jeltsch.net> writes: [...]
This is very bad IMO because of the existence of the German word "Kind" which you also mention below which means child.
well, my experience having to do with translating to French parts of ISO standards has been that those sorts of confusion are unavoidable.
If you really want to avoid confusion, you end up inventing new words, which some people find worse than reusing existing words or not translating at all. The usual trick is to redefine from the outset what the words mean in the technical contexts. This is what is done, even in English! It is not like "constructor", "type" or "class" do not already have meanings. The example of Xmas tree constructors meeting kids can actually lead to pleasant programs to read ;-)
Of course, natural language is alway ambiguous as someone already mentioned. And we often have to reuse existing words like "constructor" or "type" for scientific purposes which forces us to declare what we mean with these words.
I propose that all future haskell discussion take place in lojban. :) http://www.lojban.org/ I will start tranlating the jhc docs. (which is very easy as there arn't any) John -- John Meacham - ⑆repetae.net⑆john⑈