Subject: [Ltru] Re: "mis" update review request

From: "Doug Ewell" <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 18 Apr 2007 06:47:21 -0700

Guys,

Please try to resist:

1. cross-posting this thread to ietf-languages and LTRU
2. quoting hundreds of lines of historical material with every post

Thanks,

--
Doug Ewell  *  Fullerton, California, USA  *  RFC 4645  *  UTN #14
http://users.adelphia.net/~dewell/
http://www1.ietf.org/html.charters/ltru-charter.html
http://www.alvestrand.no/mailman/listinfo/ietf-languages

_______________________________________________
Ltru mailing list
[email-masked]
https://www1.ietf.org/mailman/listinfo/ltru

---

From: "Doug Ewell" <[email-masked]>
Date: Sat, 21 Apr 2007 14:14:52 -0700

(Cross-posted as an exception to my usual practice.)

John Cowan <cowan at ccil dot org> wrote:

> You have for whatever reason decided that reading and writing code 
> (presumably exclusive of comments, which are unquestionably in English 
> or French or Japanese or what have you) is linguistic behavior, but 
> why?  Learning to program is very unlike either acquiring French or 
> Esperanto as a first language, or learning them as a second language, 
> though admittedly more like the latter than the former.  Are you also 
> willing to say that mathematical formulae embedded in a math paper in 
> English, French, German, Russian, or what have you are linguistic 
> content, though certainly not in any of those languages?

While I continue not to lose any sleep over this, I agree completely 
with the content and tone of this posting and John's others.

Programming languages have always been out of scope for BCP 47. 
Asserting that source code (e.g.) needs to be provided with a BCP 47 tag 
is not just a question of broadening one subtag or another, but of 
redefining the scope of BCP 47.  We could easily find ourselves 
embroiled in the whole Morse code, dance notation, smoke signals debate, 
which I'm fairly sure is not what most of us want.

I suggest:

    x-src-c
    x-src-pascal
    x-src-fortran
    x-src-sql
    x-src-postscrp

and so forth, but only if absolutely necessary.