From Evolution of a 100% Free Software-Based Publisher
Not 100% good
by Anonymous Coward on Mon May 08, 04:00 AM (#15282148)
I hear they don't provide source code for their books. The use some proprietary language called "Italian."
Did you know?
by Anonymous Coward on Mon May 08, 04:19 AM (#15282195)
Italian is an OO version of Latin and you can overload most methods in Italian by waving your hands about wildly.
Actually...
by WilliamSChips (793741) Alter Relationship <full DOT infinity AT gmail DOT com> on Mon May 08, 04:45 AM (#15282257)
(http://zrax.net/~william | Last Journal: Thu May 04, 06:13 AM)
Latin is open source as well, it has many forks such as Spanish, French, and Italian, and even has parts of its code present in English. Latin included many innovative features, such as the ablative case. You could do almost *anything* with that. A pity all the modern languages find ablative "too hard for newbies" and no longer include it.
Oh god Latin. The "too hard
Oh god Latin. The "too hard for newbies" thing is truer than I'd like to believe. It has so many weird cases and tenses that you just don't see in languages today, because they're bloody insane!
Like the future pluperfect tense. "In the future will have had done" as a tense of every verb.
1. Ow.
2. Why?
Plus that whole thing where you've got two forms of future. Future "Will do" and future "should do". Take the verb "to do" (ago/agere), put it in that tense, and you get "Things we should do in the future", or as the Romans would say, agenda :).
And you gotta love position independant syntax. In english, if you want to say "Bob loves flowers", you have to say it like that. "loves bob flowers" and "flowers loves bob" don't mean the same thing, but in Latin, they do. You can order words in a sentence any way you want, and it still makes sense!
Poets really liked that "feature". All kinds of neat wording tricks you can play when you can rearrange all the words and still make sense.