Category talk:Plain English

Clutter?

I am concerned that this "language" clutters up the place (RC). It seems to me that each entry is merely a bare-bones re-telling of the Task Description. On the plus side, this language does supply some stress relief and some levity. I'm not encouraging anyone to remove it, but if it was decided to omit it, I could understand why.

I await the first "alternate" Plain English entry, where another description of the algorithm points out how the "program" can be made more efficient or faster...

And if "Plain English" does stick around, will others, such as "Français Ordinaire", "Español Llano", and the like, step up to be counted? That might make RC very cluttered. --Enter your username (talk) 06:26, 16 September 2020 (UTC)

You're annoyed Plain English programs look like task descriptions? I am sure the language creators would consider that high praise. You seem to be under the impression that this language is a toy or a joke. I invite you to take a look at Plain English's compiler, which is written in Plain English. It may quickly alleviate you of that impression, as it did me. I wouldn't be submitting examples for this language if I didn't believe it is a serious language with something to offer.

Regarding your concerns about efficiency, I am somewhat mystified why this is even a concern for the (intentionally) trivial tasks I have been submitting to (for now). How much more efficient would you like basic language constructs, loops and type conversions to be? --Chunes (talk) 11:36, 16 September 2020 (UTC)

I have looked at the Plain English compiler written in Plain English, and it's nice, very nice indeed. But where would one find a working executable compiler? Without one, it's hardly possible to test that any of the task implementations actually work correctly.

I have found and tested two executables purporting to be a working Plain English compiler: cal-3040.exe and cal-4700.exe, found at [1] and [2] respectively.

The former appeared to work at first, seemingly being able to compile the compiler itself, producing an executable named osmosian.exe in the compiler folder, which works exactly as the original cal-3040.exe. In fact, it is exactly the same file, byte for byte. And that was a bit suspicious, so I tried the "official" sample program source.txt obtained from [3]. And I was not very surprised when the result of compiling source.txt was again an executable named osmosian.exe; again a byte-for-byte copy of cal-3040.exe. In other words, the compiler didn't compile anything, it just created a copy of itself named osmosian.exe. Impressive.

Then I looked for another version of the compiler, thinking maybe cal-3040.exe is just buggy, and I found cal-4700.exe. The name suggests it is a newer, better version. Indeed, this one has a new feature – it only makes a copy of itself when ran on its own source. When compiling source.txt, it showed an error message I need a routine to 'initialize before run'. and besides that produced no output. Then I tested a few task implementations from RC. I picked those which were supposed to produce output, and thus prove that the program – and hence the compiler – works correctly. These tasks all contain a definition To run:, and they all ended up in an error message Error in the desktop. I already know how to 'run'. without producing any other output.

At this point I am having a hard time believing this language is not a joke, though I hope I am wrong because the idea is enticing and someone has obviously put extraordinary effort into the whole... thing. There's 120 pages of documentation and a grammar description in EBNF; source code of the compiler which is over 23,000 LoC (excluding empty lines and comments); there's the executable "compiler" which is more of an IDE, with user interface providing such functionality as copying files, creating new folders, sorting or reversing selected lines of a file and all kinds of stuff that one would not expect even from somewhat advanced text editors; there is a rather sizable blog [4]; and then there is the mentioned sample application, with source code, and an executable which actually works... (but was it compiled from the Plain English source or written in another language?) It seems there's pretty much everything, except a working compiler. And under these conditions, I consider Plain English clutter. --Dick de Bill (talk) 18:25, 20 September 2020 (UTC)

Added a discussion link to the main page. While this is not really my cup of tea, it is quite wrong to suggest or imply this is not a "real" programming language. --Pete Lomax (talk) 15:49, 16 September 2020 (UTC)

Ah, the clue train shows signs of slowing down to a stop for me. It seems that I had only come across the PE examples at RC where the task description did not require output. I eventually spotted one with output, and noted that the PE source was indeed substantial enough to accomplish the task. I apologize for the disparaging remarks I made about PE. I stand corrected, not clutter. --Enter your username (talk) 17:25, 16 September 2020 (UTC)