(Forked from theletterf, pedantic updates moi).
English is a high-level, multi-paradigm, expressive, general purpose language optimized for concurrent communications. English has been successfully used in a wide variety of scenarios, such as long-term data storage, analog and digital arts, and text-based adventures, to name a few. To date, English is used on more than 1,456 million carbon-based devices, and powers more than five million books.
English has been designed over the course of fourteen centuries. Its history is rich and diverse, and English is so ubiquitous that most other programing languages utilize a narrow subset of English. There are a number of standards which are generally interchangeable, although there are subtle edge cases which result in pursing errors. Several of the standards are extraordinarily detailed, such as the CMOS.
CMOS (The Chicago Manual of Style)
TAPS (The Associated Press Stylebook)
MLAH (Modern Language Association Handbook)
The occasional incompatibilities between standards mostly relate to syntax. For instance TAPS does not utilize the Oxford comma syntax, while the CMOS does. Using one when the other is called for can result in parsing errors, therefore it is preferred to stick to one standard.
- Portability: The English IDE follows a "write/rewrite, post, and read" paradigm (WRPAR)
- Extensibility: Like Lua, English can borrow constructs and keywords from other languages.
- Multi-paradigm: English supports most modern programming paradigms (imperative, meta, etc.)
- Resilience: English programs can execute on organic hardware despite severe syntax errors.
- Polymorphism: English evolves over time without having to refactor existing codebases.
English's stability makes it ideal for long-term projects where data integrity is more important than precision: The last breaking change in the specifications happened five centuries ago and there are no plans for further major releases, as the class libraries continue to expand using an iterative approach pertaining to releases.
English's mantra is "there's more than one way to say it", and WRPAR is often referred to as "writing is rewriting".
This is a typical English program that implements the Frost pathfinding algorithm:
Two roads diverged in a yellow wood,
And sorry I could not travel both
And be one traveler, long I stood
And looked down one as far as I could
To where it bent in the undergrowth;
Then took the other, as just as fair,
And having perhaps the better claim,
Because it was grassy and wanted wear;
Though as for that the passing there
Had worn them really about the same,
And both that morning equally lay
In leaves no step had trodden black.
Oh, I kept the first for another day!
Yet knowing how way leads on to way,
I doubted if I should ever come back.
I shall be telling this with a sigh
Somewhere ages and ages hence:
Two roads diverged in a wood, and I—
I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference.
For other examples, see the Poe recursive !> algorithm, affectionally known as "Raven", and the Thomas /Dev/Null != dominion database algorithm with its sync|C incrementing loop.
- English uses whitespace and commas to delimit words, relying heavily on punctuation.
- Correct statements within a block are written in sentence case, except:
- Independent declaratory statements of class "title" or class "headline" may be all upper case, or title case
- Title case is similar to pascal case, but with whitespace between each keyword.
- Statements can end with a period or, less frequently, with a semicolon.
- Statements of the list, title, or headline classes can end with a line break.
- Blocks using hard-wrap are separated by two or more line breaks.
- Blocks using soft-wrap are separated by a single line break.
- Most modern English IDEs default to soft wrap.
- However, hard wrap is a requirement for some legacy devices, such as:
- One legacy hard wrap device is called "typewriter".
- Another is known colloquially as "pen && paper".
- Numerical Addressing & Memory Allocation:
- Fixed memory blocks known as pages, are assigned a numerical decimal address, sequentially per execution order.
- Some paradigms utilize additional addressing schemes, overlaid on top of the page numerical decimal address.
- The book form of executable creates independent sequential addresses for a plurality of sequential page groups.
- The magazine form of executable may use a string address identifier, and interleaved page groups.
- Line numbering is still used in some formal paradigms such as legal, but is otherwise frowned upon.
English uses the following operators:
!: Emphasize execution (similar to CSS's!important). Can be stacked?: Request information or open data stream thread. Can be stacked?!The request and emphasize operators can be stacked together. See overloading
,: Concatenate statements in the same block. See keywords and or.: End of statement;: End of statement (weak, can not end a block)\n: End of block, immediately after the.(hard-wrap IDEs require\n\n):: Definition, for example for functions or clauses...: Temporarily suspend async execution (similar toawait)—: Short break in execution or definition of list items-: Combine keywords into a group or split a keyword across a newline&: Combine keywords or sub-statements into a non-exclusive set/: Combine keywords maintaining independence and/or exclusivity†: Reference to a footnote class comment and comment identifier(: Open inline code comment†, close with)[: Open sub comment within a comment, close with]{: Optional sub-routine, such as to catch edge cases, close with}": Import value from another module or class': (1) Nested imported value inside another import': (2) Followed by symbol "s" asserts ownership, or a property, of an object.': (3) Between symbols "n" & "t", negates the preceding keyword.¶: Indicate block start in some paradigms (arcane)§: Indicate section break in some paradigms (such as legal)
†Code comments are added using parentheses or round brackets. Unlike other programming languages, English executes code comments with lower priority to enrich execution context and debug logging. For example:
Are you considering your life choices (reading silly repos) at this very moment?
However comments of the footnote class, and related external reference classes, are only executed optionally as determined at runtime, therefore the main code must not be dependent on footnote class or external reference class objects.
Overloading: English operators can be overloaded, although this is not recommended by the ENG23 committee.
English statements are free-form and execution depends on the interpreter's training, as well as word order. Conditional execution and exception handling also depend on the mood and tense of the keywords, as well as resources available. Some interpreters my be set to a high speed parsing known as skim mode, and while execution speed can be substantially increased, there is a risk missing keywords or whole statements, resulting is run-time errors.
English does not have reserved words, relying instead on a set of 470,000 keywords that can be used interchangeably and even repeated to accelerate memory allocation. Some consider the keyword operators "and", "but", & "or" to be reserved, but in fact they are only "semi-reserved", as they can be fully combined into any number of unique keywords, losing their original meaning as operators all together.
The keyword training process results in scores that make the usage of certain keywords less likely. Keywords that score higher in the profanity dimension might cause the system to panic in some contexts.
English has only two base data structures, Lists and Raw. However, any number of new data structures can be created through schema definition and creative use of punctuation. Some are pre-defined in the aforementioned standards documents.
English uses context-sensitive and duck typing. The only base types are strings and numbers, with no size limit. Buffer overflows are typically handled by the interpreter, which performs just-in-time (JIT) type casting and guessing. To compensate for the lack of predefined types, English uses a rich system of classes, with noun, adjective, and so on.
English programs are self-documenting and implement literate programming. Exceptions exist, such as the abstract note object, which is frequently instantiated by the interpreter itself, for its own use as a non-volitile stack, but using fewer keywords that needed to execute, with the remaining keywords held in RAM. This frequently results in a parse error when the object is sent to an alternate interpreter.
For example, if the abstract note object contained the keyword "eggs", with the originating machine holding the keywords "dozen large AA" in RAM, but then transfers the object to an alternate interpreter, without transmitting the RAM contents, the alternate interpreter could execute in error, fetching "Cadbury creme" from the wrong stack. Such an error can result in a condition where the two interpreters remain out of sync for an extended period, unable to communicate. It is for this reason that such objects be immediately deallocated, and not reused or transferred.
Currently, the only compiler available is Wernicke. It requires a temporal lobe trained in social settings for at least three to four years, though better results can be achieved with training runs in excess of 30 years.
Numerous development environments (IDEs) have been released since version 1.0. The most common editors for English are Word and Docs, although programs can still be written in WordPerfect, Vi, and emacs. English is unique in that it can be coded on almost any medium capable of supporting scratches and marks, such as paper, stone, or clay.
There are millions of English libraries available. You can look for the closest in Google Maps. Most libraries permit executing code within the library via a free to use license, but require a "card" token with varying license terms to run the executable outside of or remotely from the designated library.
The English community is vibrant, with more than 150 distributions available. For a complete list of forks see List of dialects.