Quoting AlgoMantra <algomantra_at_gmail.com>:
> Computers are cultural artifacts too - the use of the English alphabet is
> almost ubiquitous
> in computing. It is hardwired and encoded, burned into the very heart of the
> device.
It is not. The "very heart of the device" sees only numbers.
The experience of computation is cultural but computation itself is
not. Turing Completeness is not a property of English or Swahili any
more than addition is.
There is no language that it is impossible to derive identifiers for a
programming language from (if unicode doesn't contain the alphabet it
can be phonetically encoded using Hangul). It would be aesthetically
and politically fascinating if there were.
> On the other hand, India has 500+ recognised languages, out of which NASA
> has a study on ancient Sanskrit - citing it as a promising computing
> language for knowledge representation in NLP.
Sanskrit is a cultural aterfact and its continued use is in no small
part religious and political. This does not affect its formal
qualitites or its suitability for use in the task of knowledge
representation.
Cultural artefaction is a cultural artefact.
- Rob.
Received on Fri Jan 11 2008 - 13:24:30 GMT