--Originally published at Codebuster
I’ve met several foreigners in my life and the’ve all told me the same thing. Spanish is such a hard language to learn- we have so many idioms and slang varying from state to state. Well, if its hard for people, it sure as hell is worse for computers. Italian, German, English and such are all natural languages, but computers can’t run on this. They use what is called a formal language, this is an important difference.
In a formal language, a statement has one -and only one- meaning, despite redundancy. They need to be very concise and specific, since they literally mean what is written, a misplaced comma or spelling error could be fatal.
Lastly, because of the way they are written, formal languages shouldn’t be read like we read a normal book. Instead, we should learn to break up the program in our head, interpreting the structure.
