Newsgroups: comp.lang.lisp
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From: lgm@polaris.ih.att.com (Lawrence G. Mayka)
Subject: Re: Common Lisp's dual name space
In-Reply-To: barmar@nic.near.net's message of 4 Nov 1994 14:25:47 -0500
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Date: Mon, 14 Nov 1994 02:22:57 GMT
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In article <39e1rr$g1v@tools.near.net> barmar@nic.near.net (Barry Margolin) writes:

   A point I made in an earlier posting is that it's natural for humans to
   think of nouns and verbs as being independent.  We find sentences like "I
   object to that object" perfectly natural.  It would be very easy to
   inadvertently write something like:

I feel obliged to solidify the points that I think others have already
made about this example: It only shows the bizarre peculiarities of
the English language in particular.  Many other languages do have
distinctive forms (e.g., endings) for nouns vs. verbs; and many
languages have a regular stress pattern, so that stress is used for
pronounceability and euphony, and not for semantic distinction; and I
would certainly hope that most languages in which stress is
semantically crucial would at least mark such stress in their written
form.

I have historically been a (mild) Lisp-2 advocate.  But I shudder to
use English as my model for argumentation purposes.
--
        Lawrence G. Mayka
        AT&T Bell Laboratories
        lgm@ieain.att.com

Standard disclaimer.
