Oh please. Have you never debugged your own or another's code? Have you ever stepped through the code, simulating the machine's behavior either mentally or on paper? Of course you have, at the level of the higher level code (not at the level of the machine language I would expect). How else could you write an algorithm in Perl without being able to mentally simulate how the code gets executed? How is that not both speaker and audience of the high level code? You can only be a meaningful speaker of a language that you are also capable of being a meaningful listener of.

The speaker/listener construct that you are trying to force upon us bring into this discussion just doesn't fit with what is happening when someone programs a computer. The fact that Pascal and French are both called "languages" is a flaw in how we label things and shouldn't force us to treat them as one and the same theoretically. The mental/symantic hoops that we are jumping through to debate this makes my point.

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The speaker/listener dichotomy is something you first brought into this discussion in this node, and continued to focus upon in this one. You can't have it both ways. Your intial forays into this discussion were all about programmer as speaker and machine as listener, something I not only disagreed very strongly with, but I think is a fundamental, categorical flaw in your reasoning on this particular topic. Please reread my earlier response to your introduction of the speaker/listener dichotomy.

A programming language's purpose is not to "facilitate speaking to machines" as you state. I can speak to machines much easier in English, and often do even if some the words I speak may not be found in most English dictionaries :-P The purpose of a programming language is to facilitate writing instructions that control a machine, the machine is never a "listener" in any sensible application of the word. Why do we construct higher level programming languages? So that we can express those instructions in higher level terms and expressions that make more sense to *us*. We are the audience.

Great, I've reduced you to lame-assed semantic arguments. Here, let me missspel some werds so taht yuu can critigue my spelink to. The moment that ANY discussion between ANY two humans about getting computers to do anything is carried on in a programming language is the moment you'll have me sold.

#!/usr/bin/perl
print "This is a dumb argument.\n";
while(1) {
    print "No it's not!\n";
    print "Yes it is!\n";
}
[download]

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If a may interject for a moment ...... wouldn't a debate about language almost always involve lame-assed semantic arguments ...... on both sides ...... almost by definition? And both sides always think the ass is lamer on the other side.