Old kanji, old kana
A few weekends ago I visited a nearby university to enjoy a culture day celebration. In their library they featured a few old manuscripts showing how Japanese writing changed over the centuries.
Kanji, the chinese characters that Japan imported for their own use, are the oldest form of writing system used. This manuscript is dated 1217AD and only uses Kanji:
In this document over a hundred years later, 1354, you can see hiragana (although hiragana has been around longer)
November 18th, 2009 at 9:29 am
Are they the same document, written two different ways? The programmer in me must know which was is more concise and elegant? “Oh yeah! Well, I can write that same document in 5 lines of hiragana? Less words means fewer syntactical errors!”
(note to self that hiragana, nor kanji, end their lines in semicolons, but if they did would they be sideways?)
I have a feeling that japanese syntax would be good for concurrent programming.
November 18th, 2009 at 6:06 pm
ROFL!!!!
pretty sure these are different documents