00:00:38 <ihope> #quit a nice day we're having, eh?
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00:02:59 <ihope> I'll let you all play with EagleBot, not that there's much you can do with EagleBot other than make it quit,
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00:11:04 <pikhq> #magic Egobot, work, damn it!
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00:53:10 <SimonRC> The Pirahã language is not recursive. They seem to lack to most forms of abstraction, such as numbers, or colours seperate from objects. They have no creation myths, and do not get the idea of storing food for next month.
00:53:15 <SimonRC> http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2007/04/16/070416fa_fact_colapinto
00:56:57 <SimonRC> it is possibly the world's only remaining "primitive" language
00:57:20 <boily> no numbers... it must be difficult to express quantities...
01:04:00 <bsmntbombdood> i wonder if there's languages that are super-english
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01:08:16 <ihope> Super-English languages? I dunno--English seems pretty good.
01:08:53 <bsmntbombdood> that's only because you can only think what your language allows
01:08:56 <ihope> There's not especially much you can't express using the "subject verb preposition noun" stuff.
01:09:28 <bsmntbombdood> because you can only conceive of the "subject verb preposition noun" stuff
01:09:59 <bsmntbombdood> if there is a language that can express higher ideas, you wouldn't even be able to describe it in english
01:10:10 <ihope> Ah yes--the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis.
01:10:44 <ihope> Can you think, though, of anything that *might* not be able to be expressed using subject-verb-preposition-noun?
01:11:07 <ihope> We even have "that", which turns a verb-preposition-noun into an adjective-like construct.
01:11:34 <ihope> "The dog that goes to the store speaks with the clouds."
01:12:08 <bsmntbombdood> maybe if you could decouple thought from language...
01:12:11 <ihope> I think mathematicians do a good job of finding weird abstract things.
01:13:11 <ihope> The notations that are used in mathematics pretty much denote values, functions, and properties.
01:13:37 <ihope> Values can be denoted by nouns, properties by verbs, and functions by preposition-noun.
01:13:57 <ihope> Does that mean, then, that English can express any mathematical idea?
01:14:08 <ihope> I'm led to believe so.
01:14:26 <bsmntbombdood> any mathematical idea that english speakers can conceive
01:15:26 <ihope> Can you prove that there are useful mathematical ideas that English speakers can't conceive?
01:15:39 <bsmntbombdood> i think the first step to proving/disproving the existance of super english languages would be to construct the turing machine or lambda calculus of languages
01:16:25 <ihope> Do we know that English isn't it?
01:16:30 <bsmntbombdood> i would think that english compared to the english-class-thought-machine would be like C++ compared to the turing machine
01:17:11 <ihope> Find someone who speaks Japanese or something and ask them if they know of anything that can't be expressed in English at all.
01:17:34 <ihope> Now, what's this language SimonRC was talking about?
01:17:51 <boily> It's a language from South America, iirc.
01:18:24 <boily> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pirah%A3_language
01:18:26 <ihope> Neither the tunes.org logs nor EagleBot's logs seem to display it correctly.
01:18:37 <ihope> That page doesn't exist.
01:20:31 <SimonRC> 00:52:25 < SimonRC> http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2007/04/16/070416fa_fact_colapinto
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02:10:31 <SimonRC> It took me a moment to realise that was what you were saying was wonderful
02:16:31 <pikhq> ihope: I speak Japanese, and don't know anything that can't be expressed in English.
02:16:53 <pikhq> (although *explaining* words which refer to some Japanese legends can take a while)
02:18:16 <ihope> I hear that Japanese has more ordinal numbers than English.
02:18:36 <ihope> English needs hacks to express the ordinal number corresponding to one half.
02:19:33 <pikhq> What you mean by "ordinal" is i9n disagreement with Wikipedia.
02:20:19 <pikhq> I want [[Ordinal numbers (linguistics)]]
02:20:42 <pikhq> ihope: Japanese has oo ordinal numbers.
02:21:15 <ihope> English has an infinite number of them too, doesn't it?
02:21:15 <pikhq> One postfixes "ban", IIRC, to make it an ordinal number.
02:21:35 <pikhq> *Technically* yes, but it's less-defined.
02:22:01 <ihope> oerjan: give me the one-twelfthth element of this list, will you?
02:22:17 <ihope> Now tell me how to pronounce that. :-)
02:22:53 <pikhq> In Japanese: 0.083??
02:23:15 <pikhq> And damn, I wish this terminal grokked Unicode.
02:23:17 <boily> I speak French, and I will not pronounce `twelfthth'.
02:23:19 <ihope> I think we're using different character encodings.
02:23:31 <pikhq> Or, rather, I wish the *font* I have grokked Unicode.
02:23:54 <ihope> Unless those question marks are actually question marks.
02:23:58 <oerjan> there can be no 1/12th element, that is meaningless
02:24:02 <pikhq> They're not *meant* to be.
02:24:10 <ihope> oerjan: what if it's a continuous list?
02:24:23 <ihope> Is it all "ban" in hiragana?
02:24:45 <pikhq> (I *might* be wrong on the specific word, though)
02:24:51 <oerjan> ihope: does that actually work in japanese?
02:25:58 <oerjan> anyway neither has got anything on Latin, which has four different classes of number
02:26:06 <ihope> Do you know, pikhq?
02:26:35 <pikhq> I *think* it works, but I can't be sure, since it's not my native language.
02:27:02 <pikhq> And, since school's out, I can't ask the people I know who *do* speak it either fluently or natively.
02:27:37 <oerjan> cardinal, ordinal, numbers like "once, twice" but generally, and "n each" numbers. Although of course they are easily expressed in English, just not with endings.
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02:31:13 <oerjan> or something like that, they're plural adjectives
02:32:36 <oerjan> let me try to remember a suitable noun to use them with
02:34:49 <oerjan> "bini oculi" would mean "two eyes each", i think
02:36:15 <oerjan> "Homines binos oculos habent" = "Humans have two eyes each"
02:41:21 <oerjan> incidentally that form is where "binary" comes from
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02:52:30 <SimonRC> This language is fucking twisted! http://www.stud.uni-hamburg.de/users/goldi/aee/beginner/beginner_toc.html
02:52:48 <SimonRC> for the first few chapters, you thing is just like Pascal.
02:53:04 <SimonRC> Then, the introduce pointers and structs, and it suddenly turns out to be like C
02:53:27 <SimonRC> then the guy adds unification, and it looks like C meets Prolog
02:53:47 <SimonRC> then it tries to be LISP, by addid quoted expressions and Eval()
02:55:24 <SimonRC> the ytpesystem tries to pretend it isn;t that of B]
03:15:32 <SimonRC> ah, no, it;s turning into C++
03:21:43 <pikhq> It's PascalFortranCPrologLispC++Assembly.
03:23:23 <SimonRC> the resulting mess is rather C++-like
03:23:30 <pikhq> Doesn't seem to have structs as an intrinsic.
03:24:02 <SimonRC> ok, so E should really be called B++
03:25:25 <pikhq> It actively encourages pointer<->integer.
03:26:07 <SimonRC> "Data-hiding is accomplished in E at the module level. This means, effectively, that it is wise to define classes in separate modules (or at least only closely related classes together in a module), taking care to EXPORT only the definitions that you need to."
03:26:13 <SimonRC> at least he got *something* right
03:26:16 <pikhq> Which is, of course, B with a better typesystem.
03:28:39 <SimonRC> For some reason popular langauges conflate the type-definition mechanism and the information-hiding mechanism, leading to crap like C++'s friend classes.
03:29:17 <pikhq> Tcl doesn't have that problem.
03:29:20 <SimonRC> they also hide the elegance of interface inheritance under the bizzarities of implementatio inheritance
03:29:30 <SimonRC> pikhq: no information-hiding?
03:29:40 <pikhq> Of course, that's because object-orientation is provided by external packages, and not a language intrinsic.
03:29:41 <SimonRC> ISTR that everything is a string in Tcl
03:30:01 <pikhq> Actually, everything is a thing.
03:30:07 <SimonRC> i.e. OO is in the libraries
03:30:12 <pikhq> It may be either a string, a list, or a number. . .
03:30:24 <SimonRC> how the fuck does that work?
03:31:09 <pikhq> Or, rather, magic in the bytecode compiler/interpreter.
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05:29:48 <pikhq> SimonRC: According to Tcl code?
05:30:01 <pikhq> Scalar and vector.
05:33:21 <pikhq> Fine, fine. . . So scalar variables can represent strings, lists, longs, or floats. . . The tclvar_t struct stores one of them, and converts when needed.
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14:06:12 <oklopol> on tuesday, i have to go to another camp :)
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18:24:21 <boily> Yesterday, I wrote an underload interpreter.
18:24:35 <boily> This language is warping my mind...
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21:12:47 <andreou> anyone knows how to reference footnotes in LaTeX?
21:21:09 <oerjan> doesn't it work to just put a \label in it?
21:35:44 <SimonRC> A word of advice people....
21:36:07 <SimonRC> If you are on Usenet, never ever mention the individual "Rob Cypher".
21:36:38 <SimonRC> He is like fecking BeetleJuice, except you only have to say his name once.
21:36:55 <SimonRC> I mentioned him, and now the group is stuck with him.
21:37:15 <oerjan> like an evil version of kibo i take
21:37:57 * oerjan hasn't been on Usenet for years
21:38:52 <oerjan> a possibility might be to mention him _everywhere_?
21:39:24 <SimonRC> that's like saying "If we all rush him at once, he can't shoot all of us".
21:41:52 <oerjan> don't people have killfiles these days?
21:42:22 <SimonRC> plus the replies are more of a problem, and the heavy cross-posting
21:42:40 <oerjan> don't people have _threaded_ killfiles these days? :)
21:44:39 <oerjan> i always used trn, the Threaded Read News
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21:46:07 <oerjan> and i heard slrn may have been even better, with its score files
21:46:20 <oerjan> these were Unix terminal applications
21:47:39 <SimonRC> I can;t figure out how to un-ignore threads
21:50:24 <andreou> oerjan i need to access the footnote number
21:50:41 <andreou> i.e., some '\*ref' command similar to pageref
21:50:53 <oerjan> andreou: isn't that what \ref does?
21:52:29 <SimonRC> I have to make it visible again first using the لآهثص ةثىع
21:52:47 <SimonRC> I have to make it visible again first using the view menu
21:53:25 <andreou> oerjan well indeed it does
21:53:34 <andreou> inherent stupidity increases along with uptime
21:53:50 <SimonRC> bah, it only allows me to ignore what it thinks of as a whole thread
21:53:56 <oerjan> andreou: and approaching deadline i guess :)
21:54:25 <andreou> true words, it *should* be ready and printed in about 31 hrs (infeasible)
21:55:54 <andreou> funny thing is, i spend some time looking in the tug faq and #latex, that i forgot where i needed to crossreference a footnote...
21:57:38 <andreou> anyway, off to sleep, no more work can be done right now
21:59:45 <oerjan> SimonRC: trn allowed you to ignore the replies to a given post although some broken newsreaders did not include the threading information properly
22:00:14 <oerjan> and you could use regexps to do this automatically based on author, subject, whatever
22:00:40 <oerjan> (although article content was more expensive than headers)
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22:05:50 <oerjan> sadly, trn seems to have stalled about 2001
22:06:17 <oerjan> hopefully because it was outrun by better competitors.
23:16:11 <RodgerTheGreat> I think I may try to make something nontrivial with it
23:16:46 <RodgerTheGreat> math may prove rather tricky unless I do most things in unary.