Comment by dragonwriter
5 days ago
> Yeah because normal people never have to deal with alphanumeric strings...
Natural language tends to have a high degree of disambiguating redundancy and is used to communicate between humans, who are good at making use of that. Programming languages have somewhat less of disambiguating redundancy (or in extreme cases almost none), and, most critically, are used to communicate with compilers and interpreters that have zero capacity to make use of it even when it is present.
This makes "letter looks like a digit that would rarely be used in a place where both make sense" a lot more of a problem for a font used with a programming language than a font used for a natural language.
People named Al are having a field day with the recent AI boom.
El confusion is absolutely a problem for regular people.
This indeed. In the last couple of years, I've had to re-read a whole lot of sentences because I read it as the wrong Al/AI in my head at first.
> Natural language
I said alphanumeric strings not natural language. Things like order codes, authentication codes, license numbers, etc.
That yaa can gat ba wath ana waval dasn't maan that wa all shaald start wratang laka thas.
Alright, Lumpy Space Princess
Legal language isn't very natural
Legal language is natural language with particular domain-specific technical jargon; like other uses of natural language, it targets humans who are quite capable of resolving ambiguity via context and not compilers and interpreters that are utterly incapable of doing so.
Not that official State Department communication is mostly “legal language” as distinct from more general formal use of natural language to start with.
The US Supreme Court uses Century or Century Schoolbook.