An idea for a programming language called "Grammar". The idea was to base it on "normal" english as much as possible. No additional work was done on this idea. It's just a brain dump.

sketch-1.rb

Grammar Sketch 1.


New Noun Dog from the Animal family
Noun:Dog Family:Animal
Noun: Dog Family: Animal
Noun: Big Dog from Family: Dog

Verb: bark
  at: a volume
  for: a length of time
  at: a time of day



Civ is a Dog. 
Civ's age is 12. 
Civ's color is black. 


Civ, bark at 10 volume for 10 minutes at midnight.
Civ's age is 13. 

sketch-2.rb

Grammar Sketch 2.

https://gist.github.com/57559c1ea67fb1eff37f

# Remember, I'm a comp-sci dummy.
# This is just a thought experiment.
# It started after I read an oral history of Xerox PARC:
# Dealers of Lighting.
# The Alan Kay / Adele Goldberg / Smalltalk stuff got me thinking.



# The idea is that things are more closely tied to
# English grammar, parts of speech, and sentence structure.


Noun Dog
  Verb bark at:volume
    puts "woof!" * volume
  end
end

# obviously, the only real difference above is:
# Classes called Nouns.
# Methods called Verbs.
# All arguments are keywords,
# I'm thinking all keywords are prepositions.
# Ignore the puts line syntax for now.



Noun Dog
  Verb bark at:volume
    puts "woof!" * volume
  /verb
/noun

# "end" doesn't quite feel right to me.
# And I love me some html closers.
# Maybe something like /thing to close a thing.
# I dunno.



# Then there's inheritance stuff.
# A Dog is an Animal.
# A Cat is also an Animal.
# Both Cats and Dogs can run.
# Makes sense to share that run codes.
# How to do that?

class Dog < Animal
end

# or

class Dog
  include Animal
end

# I'm sure there's CS lang implementation consequense of both.
# Here's some sketches.

New Noun Dog from the Animal family
Noun:Dog Family:Animal
Noun: Dog Family: Animal
Noun: Big Dog from Family: Dog


# Here's a verb/method sketch.

Verb: bark at: a volume for: a length of time at: a time of day

Verb: bark
  at: a volume
  for: a length of time
  at: a time of day

# One or multiple lines.
# Either way, the obvious first issue is:
# What happens when a verb has more than one of the same preposition.


# Instance variables.
# Dog is a noun.
# Civ is a particular Dog.
# Sketch.

Civ is a Dog.


# Setting attributes.
# One or multiple lines.
# Sketch.

Civ's age is 12 and color is black.

Civ's age is 12.
Civ's color is black.


# Punctuation is important.
# . 
# '
# :
# ,

# Period to end a sentence.

Civ is a Dog.

# Apostrophe.
# Single quote:
# - word <single quote> s
# - word that ends in s <single quote>

Civ's color is black.
Civ's age.


# Colon.
# Key/value separator.
# Key indicator.
# In sentences.
# And in Noun/Verb definitions or whatever.

Noun: Dog Family: Animal

Verb Bark at:volume for: length of time


# Commas.
# For addressing nouns and issuing commands.

Civ, bark.
Civ, bark for 10 minutes at midnight.
Civ, bark for:10 minutes at:midnight.
Civ, bark for: 10 minutes at: midnight.




# Capitalization.
# Start of a sentence.
# Proper nouns.
# Civ is both the start of the sentence and a proper noun.
# Dog is a proper noun.

Civ is a Dog.



# I've only started thinking about "primitives".
# I like the HTML names for things better than
# the comp-sci names for things.

# IMHO:
# ordered list   > array
# unordered list > set

# definition list ... hash
# dl is not super great
# table is good
# dictionary is ...meh

# HTML doesn't really have names for strings, integers and floats. But
# text > string
# number > integer


# That's about all I've got right now.
# Go!