Universal Prokee Language

The Universal Prokee Language (UPL) is a programming language based on natural languages and semantic nets.

Programming in Chinese?

Some inspiration for UPL comes indeed from the Chinese language.

In most languages, written words are representations of their phonetic sequence (spoken words). The atomic symbols of a written language (the letters) therefore represent the sounds, which form the spoken words of that language. The amount of different sounds of a human language is very small, so a small alphabet is sufficient to be able to write every word of such a language. By knowing all spelling rules one can theoretically write and read German or English words without necessarily being able to understand them. In contrast, the Chinese language is completely different.

In Chinese the meanings of words are represented by Symbols (Chinese characters), without being required to know how a word is spoken. At the early beginnings of the Chinese language every symbol represented a word and every word was written by a single symbol. And also today most Chinese words consist of only very few (one or two, rarely 4 or more) characters. The consequence of this is, that a huge "alphabet" is required, and avoiding the introduction of unnecessary symbols is essential.

In German e.g. we have inflection of nouns and verbs. German words come in different forms regarding to cases (nominative, accusative, genitive and dative), genders (masculine, feminine and neuter), number (singular or plural), conjugation classes, persons (first second and third), moods (infinitive, indicative, imperative and subjunctive), voices (active and passive), tenses and so on. All those different forms are essential for German.

Trying to write German with Chinese characters would fail, because all the different forms of words in German would require to invent lots of new different Chinese characters. This would result in way to many characters for a human to be able to remember. But how does the Chinese language encode the same information with much fewer words? It does so by replacing inflection with word order.

When we look at computer languages, we normally do not have inflection of keywords, but we do have a fixed word order to build valid sentences. These similarities and the differences to other natural languages resulted in considerations to develop a new language, that is as simple as possible by focusing on word order and eliminating the overhead in complexity common to all natural languages, which includes Chinese as well. So we do not want to program in Chinese but rather take some inspirations from it, to develop a completely new language.

Semantic Nets

A semantic net is a representation of words (or objects, or classes of objects) and the relationships between those words.

Has-A Relationship

The has-a relationship between two objects (or words) describes ownership. E.g. a car has-a steering wheel.

The has-a relationship is the default relationship between consecutive words. The sentence "A car has a steering wheel." translates into UPL as shown below.

Car SteeringWheel

If we refer to the steering wheel, the statement above may also be interpreted as "the steering wheel of the car" or "a steering wheel of a car". See #Paths and Queries on how to refer explicitly to a specific item.

Is-A Relationship

The is-a relationship between two objects (or words) describes inheritance. E.g. a car is-a vehicle.

The default is-a operator is the colon ':'. The sentence "A car is a vehicle." translates into UPL a shown below.

Car:Vehicle

Multiple inheritance can be established by stating all superclasses concatenated by a comma ','.

E.g.

C:Letter,ProgrammingLanguage,RomanNumeral

would be interpreted as: 'C' is a letter, a programming language and a roman numeral.

Other Relationships

Other relationships can be established by a concatenation of has-a and is-a relationships.