Quotes About Syntax

Pronouns are proxies for nouns. They stand in willingly when nouns don't want to hang around sounding repetitive. The noun (or noun phrase), whose bidding the pronoun does, is called the antecedent—because it goes (ced-) before (ante-) the pronoun in the sentence or paragraph.

If you're talking about Java in particular, Python is about the best fit you can get amongst all the other languages. Yet the funny thing is, from a language point of view, JavaScript has a lot in common with Python, but it is sort of a restricted subset.

To shift the structure of a sentence alters the meaning of that sentence, as definitely and inflexibly as the position of a camera alters the meaning of the object photographed.

XML is not a language in the sense of a programming language any more than sketches on a napkin are a language.

GOTO, n.: A programming tool that exists to allow structured programmers to complain about unstructured programmers.

When expressing a regular character literal, you simply use single quotes: 'This is a regular character string literal'. When expressing a Unicode character literal, you need to specify the character N (for National) as a prefix: N'This is a Unicode character string literal'.

We elevate the status of others with compliments, flattery, ingratiating comments, public roasts, awards, and outright praise and adoration. People around the world systematically use the tactics of politeness—hesitations, indirectness, apologies, formalities—when speaking with higher-status individuals. These subtle shifts in phrasing, syntax, and delivery convey the respect that the speaker feels toward the recipient.

Gottlob Frege's Begriffsschrift.

Case is the inflectional variation in a noun7 that encompasses various syntactical functions or relationships to other words. Or, put more simply, case is a matter of form rather than function. Each case has one form but many functions.

American Sign Language—ASL—is a language unto itself, with its own syntax and grammar. Adjectives follow nouns, as in Romance languages.

I see graphic design as the organization of information that is semantically correct, syntactically consistent and pragmatically understandable.

One eventually had to confront it. Wasn't Hitler's own struggle to express himself in German the crucial subtext of his massive ranting autobiography, dictated in a fortress prison in the Bavarian hills? Grammar and syntax. The man may have felt himself imprisoned in more ways than one.

M. Mitchell Waldrop

Since he'd based it on an earlier, experimental language by Thompson, code-named "B," Ritchie code-named his language "C.

It is as if there is no syntax, no grammar, that can contain their suffering. Only a list of things perceived.

When you translate poetry in particular, you're obliged to look at how the writer with whom you're working puts together words, sentences, phrases, the triple tension between the line of verse, the syntax and the sentence.

Because shelves are Python objects containing Python objects, we can process them with normal Python syntax and development modes. Here, the interactive prompt effectively becomes a database client:

and indent all but the simplest of blocks.

In general terms, the loop else simply provides explicit syntax for a common coding scenario — it is a coding structure that lets us catch the "other" way out of a loop, without setting and checking flags or conditions.

We met the list comprehension briefly in Chapter 4. Syntactically, its syntax is derived from a construct in set theory notation that applies an operation to each item in a set, but you don't have to know set theory to use this tool.

Despite its syntax details, Python's class system really is largely just a matter of searching for an attribute in a tree of objects, along with a special first argument for functions.

When a German dives into a sentence, you won't see him again until he emerges at the other end with the verb between his teeth.

A verb has a hard enough time of it in this world when it is all together. It's downright inhuman to split it up. But that's what those Germans do. They take part of a verb and put it down here, like a stake, and they take the other part of it and put it a way over yonder like another stake, and between these two limits they just shovel in German.

Word endings fell away. Prepositions came in which took the language away from the Germanic and made it more English. Instead of adding a lump on the end of words, you could use 'to' or 'with'. 'I gave the dog to my daughter.' 'I cut the meat with my knife.' The order of words became important and prepositions became more common as signposts around sentences.