
Perligata - write Perl in Latin - chrismealy
http://search.cpan.org/~dconway/Lingua-Romana-Perligata-0.50/lib/Lingua/Romana/Perligata.pm
======
swankpot
Mihi cordi est legere de lingua Latina temporibus recentibus reanimata. O
tempora, o mores, quibus litterae antiquae flocci aestimantur! Qui sese ad
pecuniam adipiscendam vehementer pellunt nullo intervallo excepto, cum ad
summam divitiarum demum adveniant, bene vivere non sciunt. Ut ait noster
Lucius in _Epistulis Moralibus_ : "Otium sine litteris mors est et hominis
vivi sepultura."

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Epistulae_morales_ad_Lucilium>

------
Luyt
_"Older natural languages have richer lexical structures (such as inflexions
for noun number and case) and therefore rely less on word order. For example,
in Latin the statements Puer dedit cani escam and Escam dedit puer cani both
mean ``The boy gave the dog the food''. Indeed, the more usual word order
would be reverse Polish, with the verb coming last: Puer cani escam dedit.

This flexibility is possible because Latin uses inflexion, not position, to
denote lexical roles. The lack of a suffix denotes that the boy (puer) is the
subject; the -i ending indicates that the dog (cani) is the indirect object;
whilst the -am ending indicates that the food (escam) is the direct object.

To say ``The food gave the boy the dog'', one might write: Puero canem esca
dedit. Here, the -o ending denotes that the boy is now the indirect object,
the -em ending indicates that the dog has become the direct object, whilst the
-a ending indicates that the food is the subject."_

Which made me think of the scene in Life of Brian in which the centurion (John
Cleese) impersonates a stern Latin teacher.
<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IIAdHEwiAy8>

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andolanra
Much more practical—although less technically interesting—is 中蟒 (pinyin
_zhōngmǎng_ ) or Chinese Python, which is a translation of a programming
language I could actually see people using. It's not as impressive as encoding
data types in grammatical gender, though; it consists primarily of translating
keywords, method names, &c into Chinese, and Chinese is close enough to
English grammatically that none of it seems all that awkward. You can find it
at
[http://www.chinesepython.org/cgi_bin/cgb.cgi/english/english...](http://www.chinesepython.org/cgi_bin/cgb.cgi/english/english.html)

Incidentally, Perl also has Lingua::tlhInganHol::yIghun by the same author;
it's the same sort of modification, except with Klingon instead of Latin. That
is here: <http://search.cpan.org/perldoc?Lingua::tlhInganHol::yIghun>

------
loewenskind
What is the point of posting a 10+ year old toy? You could do this same thing
in a very wide variety of languages, but since it's useless most people
usually don't bother.

------
Semiapies
Can we get a "2000" on this? :)

Still an amusing little project.

------
berntb
Damien has done crazier stuff; I heard a conference talk and thought "Like
seeing Cthulhu, it might be something human minds can't handle!".

Conway has written Parse::RecDescent, the eminent "Best Practices" book (which
imho should be mandatory reading for Perl programmers). And so on.

The guy is incredible.

Edit: Updated for clarity. On consideration -- he has done other things,
equally crazy. But probably not crazier. :-) Most famous is probably
<http://search.cpan.org/~dconway/Acme-Bleach/>

Hey, if you can't have fun, go join some language community that always vote
up language war insults on other communities...

~~~
pasbesoin
At YAPC 2001 (Montréal), he introduced programming in Klingon. (Yes, it really
worked.)

As I recall, it tended to emphasis imperative constructs.

------
Pooter
Doesn't really help dispel the notion that Perl is a dead language, does it?

~~~
borism
doesn't really help readability either

~~~
SwellJoe
As with Perl, your inability to read Latin is not the fault of the language.

