On 12-Sep-08 17:20, Invisible wrote:
> andrel wrote:
> 
>> Yes indeed, and if you look at what he writes about C it is not that 
>> he has problems with imperative languages in general but with this one 
>> for particular reasons.
> 
> I can write you programs in BASIC, Pascal, SDL, Tcl, Java, JavaScript, 
> PostScript, or even assembly if I have to. (Depends which processor. 
> Obviously.) But C and a few other highly complex and messy languages are 
> more than even I can cope with.
I find the 'even I' amusing.
> 
>> For fun I tried babelfish:
>> Ik werkelijk begrijp niet waarom u het zo vindt hard om C. te leren. 
[snip]
>> dingen als daar te begrijpen terwijl (*v++ = *s++); Wat is het probleem?
> 
> My God... It's... It's like... [I'm searching for the HGTTG quote]... 
> It's like a psuedo-random assortment of letters!

Is that the quote? From which book?

> Mind you, I would think _every_ language looks like that until you 
> understand the rules. ;-)
even more so if the language uses a foreign alphabet or worse.
> 
>> Even after adjusting the grammar (Ik begrijp werkelijk niet waarom u 
>> het zo hard/moeilijk vindt om C. te leren...) it will still be on the 
>> edge of comprehensible and not something any Dutchman would write.
> 
> For fun, I tried translating from and then to English with various 
> phrases on Google Translate.
Didn't know google had also a translator. Well, not better than 
babelfish. Different, but not better.

> This yielded such gems as
> 
>   "Leave the impact price-increase your body."
> 
> I cannot even begin to imagine how the hell it arrived at that... ;-)
> 
> With experimentation, it seems that the translation FROM English to 
> German significantly breaks sentences, 

how would you know?

> while the translation the other way is moderately reliable.

I can not imagine that it will translate the archetypal German sentences 
with the verb that closes the sentence 5 lines below the subject in a 
readable way.

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