Quotes About Syntax

But in the meantime there's no reason to starve the users for [syntactic] sugar. It doesn't rot their teeth and it helps them avoid mistakes. — Brendan Eich

Seibel: One way to resolve that is the way Lisp does—make everything uniformly semiconcise. Where the uniformity has the advantage of allowing users of the language to easily add their own equally uniform, semiconcise, first-class syntactic extensions.

Deutsch: My PhD thesis was a 600-page Lisp program. I'm a very heavy-duty Lisp hacker from PDP-1 Lisp, Alto Lisp, Byte Lisp, and Interlisp. The reason I don't program in Lisp anymore: I can't stand the syntax. It's just a fact of life that syntax matters.

Seibel: Some people love Lisp syntax and some can't stand it. Why is that? Deutsch: Well, I can't speak for anyone else. But I can tell you why I don't want to work with Lisp syntax anymore. There are two reasons. Number one, and I alluded to this earlier, is that the older I've gotten, the more important it is to me that the density of information per square inch in front of my face is high. The density of information per square inch in infix languages is higher than in Lisp.

Then there's a third thing, which may seem like a small thing but I don't think it is. Which is that in an infix world, every operator is next to both of its operands. In a prefix world it isn't. You have to do more work to see the other operand.

Now, if anything in the world is complex, language is complex.

The ambiguities of language, both in terms of vocabulary and syntax, are fascinating: how important connotation is, what is lost and what is gained in the linguistic transition.

A good sentence in English has a structure that begins with the second most important element, moves to the least important element, and ends with the strongest element. The pattern is 2-3-1.

Saw you walking barefoot taking a long look at the new moon's eyelid later spread sleep-fallen, naked in your dark hair asleep but not oblivious of the unslept unsleeping elsewhere Tonight I think no poetry will serve Syntax of rendition: verb pilots the plane adverb modifies action verb force-feeds noun submerges the subject noun is choking verb disgraced goes on doing now diagram the sentence

Muddled syntax is the outward and audible sign of confused minds, and the misuse of grammar the result of illogical thinking.

Note in particular that a noun denoting a group of people takes which, not who. You cannot write *the battalion who had captured the fortress because a battalion, though composed of people, is not itself a person: write the battalion which had captured the fortress.

it is impossible to use that if the relative clause is non-restrictive – that is, if it does not serve to identify the thing under discussion, but only serves to provide more information about that thing. So, you must write the Suez Canal, which was opened in 1869, and you cannot write *the Suez Canal, that was opened in 1869.

Never commence a sentence with And, But, Since, Because, and other similar weak words and never end it with prepositions, small, weak adverbs or pronouns.

There are four simple moods,—the Infinitive, the Indicative, the Imperative and the Subjunctive.

A complex sentence consists of two or more simple sentences so combined that one depends on the other to complete its meaning; as; When he returns, I shall go on my vacation. Here the words, when he returns are dependent on the rest of the sentence for their meaning. A clause is a separate part of a complex sentence, as when he returns in the last example. A phrase consists of two or more words without a finite verb.

Unlike Maxine Kumin, I never learned to pay the syntax.

Immersion teachers adjusted their use of French to make it accessible to students. They did this through careful choice of vocabulary, syntax, pacing, and intonation, and by avoiding needless complexity, making points directly rather than elliptically, and adding redundancy. Other techniques included contextual cues such as gestures, facial expressions, and body language.

Noam Chomsky pointed out, the number of possible sentences is infinite in any language; there is no limit to the grammatical combination of words. Behaviorism cannot explain how, after relatively limited exposure to a mother tongue, young children acquire complex syntactic structures and begin to produce "correct" utterances never heard before, by themselves or by others. What's more, they accomplish these amazing intellectual feats without being explicitly taught.

Those who prefer their English sloppy have only themselves to thank if the advertisement writer uses his mastery of the vocabulary and syntax to mislead their weak minds.

Joyce has freed us from the superstition of syntax, agreed the curly man.

Then there was that absurd syntax business again. No language without syntax. Well, what about Latin! These assholes didn't even know Latin! Where did these guys go to school?

Of course, like the consciousness behind it, behind any art, a poem can be deep or shallow, visionary or glib, prescient or stuck in an already lagging trendiness. What's pushing the grammar and syntax, the sounds, the images—is it the constriction of literalism, fundamentalism, professionalism—a stunted language? Or is it the great muscle of metaphor, drawing strength from resemblance in difference? The great muscle of the unconstricted throat?

In English every word can be verbed. Would that it were so in our programming languages.

I would say 'woman' used to be a noun, and now it is a noun and also an adjective. And words change their functions in that way. It's one of the most common phenomena about words. They start as one thing, and they end up as something else.