scott wrote:
>> When you think about it, the weird thing isn't so much that all human 
>> languages are inherantly vague and ambiguous. The weird thing is that 
>> this is almost never a problem. In the overwhelming majority of cases, 
>> everybody still knows *exactly* what you mean, even though strictly 
>> speaking most sentences could have several possible meanings.
> 
> There's this thing called *context* that helps humans a huge amount, it 
> allows you to understand things even though you haven't 100% understood 
> each word.

Hmm. And this "context" may not actually be in the words spoken. They 
could be in the tone of the person's voice. (E.g., somebody sends you an 
email saying "hey, this is a joke!" Are they amused or angry? Good luck 
figuring that out...) It could be their body language. It could by 
something you've discussed previously. Or it might be related to that 
"culture" concept that I don't understand.

Hmm... Good luck with getting a machine to pass a Turing test! ;-)

>> You would have thought being able to say what you mean precisely would 
>> be easier, but it clearly isn't.
> 
> I wish my compiler would say "WARNING: Hey, I guess you meant 
> variableName instead of variableNmae, as no other declared variables are 
> remotely like variableNmae", rather than "ERROR: Unknown variable 
> variableNmae".

Or better yet,

- "Unify: Cannot construct infinite type Customer = Map ID Customer".
- "Not in scope: Unqualified identifier FOo."
- "Error: Inferred type is less general than expected."

and so on.

> Writing, knowing that you need to be 100% accurate, is much harder than 
> if you know a few mitsakes wont Matter :-)

Er, yeah.

Forces you to think clearly about what you *mean* though. For example, 
how many words are there in a typical English person's vocabulary?

Seems like a perfectly well-defined question. Until you sit down and 
thing about it:

- What counts as a "word"? (Are different inflextions counted as 
"different" words? Are propper nouns included? How about 
"hexachlorophine"? Is that a word?)

- What counts as "vocabulary"? (Words you've heard of? Words that you 
know the meaning of? Words that you actually use in typical conversation?)

- What counts as a "typical English person"? (Does |NERV|Invisible 
count? I think not! Who else doesn't count? Stephen Fry?)

Suddenly you see that this question could have a wild variety of 
different yet "valid" answers. So much for a simple question...

PS. I'd still really like to know how large a typical person's 
vocabulary is. Is it 1,000 words? Or 1,000,000 words?

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