How good are your foreign language skills.

[Bosun Higgs]

It made us consider our own fairly limited foreignese - a bit of school boy French and German but quite shameful really.

Why shameful? English is as near as we can get to an international language which is why the people of small countries, even Scotland, speak it when abroad or even at home. I used to speak French fairly fluently but this ability was no use whatsoever outside France

 

[prv]

I used to speak French fairly fluently but this ability was no use whatsoever outside France

Would also have worked in much of North Africa and a few bits of the Pacific, I believe.

Pete

 

[AntarcticPilot]

Did anyone actually write that? I mentioned that I was able to transfer from a classics-based stream because I was not suited for Latin but what little I did retain certainly must have helped my later language-learning ability, limited enough as it was - it may well have been even worse without the two years Latin I did have.

I may have misunderstood mjcoon

 

[BrianH]

I used to speak French fairly fluently but this ability was no use whatsoever outside France

To inject a little bit of boatyness to a thread that has drifted more into lounge territory, I found mine useful during 2009/2010 while cruising the Windies. Martinique, Les Saintes, Guadeloupe, St. Barthélemy, and St. Martin.

Yesterday too. My wife and I regularly travel from Bern to attended the Sunday concert in Lausanne and include lunch there in a lakeside restaurant. It gives both of us the chance to switch from German to French. As she studied in Geneva her French is infinitely better than mine and with her Viennese roots and having lived many years in Italy, can also beat me hands down with both German and Italian. But then, I believe the female brain was always more proficient at languages; all to do with multi-tasking ... or summat.

 

[mjcoon]

You are almost certainly not as ancient as I am. My south London grammar school had such a wide curriculum but that was in the mid to late 1940s.

True; the transfer I referred to was in mid-fifties. I guess your school was more enlightened than Bristol Grammar; I believe that the Headmaster was a classicist.

Mike.

 

[mjcoon]

I may have misunderstood mjcoon

Happy to take the blame, but I had said nothing about having done Latin for a whole year at grammar school, or its lack of effect!

Mike.

 

[Sybarite]

Why shameful? English is as near as we can get to an international language which is why the people of small countries, even Scotland, speak it when abroad or even at home. I used to speak French fairly fluently but this ability was no use whatsoever outside France

Belgium, Luxemburg, Switzerland, Monaco, Andorra, Quebec, Louisiana (in parts), Congo (Brazzaville), Rép Dem Congo, Morocco, Tunisia, Algeria, Vietnam, Senegal, Mauritania, Ivory Coast, Egypt, Lebanon, etc.

http://www.francophonie.org/IMG/pdf/oif-carte-a4_hd.pdf

 

[westernman]

Belgium, Luxemburg, Switzerland, Monaco, Andorra, Quebec, Louisiana (in parts), Congo (Brazzaville), Rép Dem Congo, Morocco, Tunisia, Algeria, Vietnam, Senegal, Mauritania, Ivory Coast, Egypt, Lebanon, etc.

http://www.francophonie.org/IMG/pdf/oif-carte-a4_hd.pdf

You won't get far with French in Vietnam these days.
Everybody less than grandad age, speaks English rather than French.

 

[Slowtack]

Gaeilge, Bearla, Fraincis agus Fortran 4

 

[interloper]

^^ I also can claim FORTRAN. It's considered a dying language, but I still use it on a regular basis. I can also claim BASIC, but I haven't used it in a long time. I studied C++, but never really used it.

 

[mjcoon]

^^ I also can claim FORTRAN. It's considered a dying language, but I still use it on a regular basis. I can also claim BASIC, but I haven't used it in a long time. I studied C++, but never really used it.

Listing programming languages could get silly... Except that I used to use one called SPURT. So when I stopped I became an ex-SPURT programmer!

Mike.

 

[prv]

I used to use one called SPURT. So when I stopped I became an ex-SPURT programmer!

Probably the only reason it was so named was in order to set up that joke

Pete

 

[AntarcticPilot]

^^ I also can claim FORTRAN. It's considered a dying language, but I still use it on a regular basis. I can also claim BASIC, but I haven't used it in a long time. I studied C++, but never really used it.

I too was a FORTRAN 66 hack! Certainly NOT dying in some quarters - too much legacy code in it to consider switching - same as COBOL in business. But today's FORTRAN isn't what I remember - automatic typing on the initial letter of variables, fixed layout based on punched cards, and the glory of SHARED COMMON - which allowed you to do all sorts of wonderful things when translating binary formats! I remember writing code to translate from one floating point format to another, and SHARED COMMON allowed me to dissect out the differnt bits of the FP.

Mind it is a truism that you can write FORTRAN in any decent language (perhaps not in LISP!)

These days, Java, JavaScript, SQL and other things.

 

[maby]

ALGOL68 - At Last, God's Own Language!

If it had taken off, we would all be leading a life of leisure now while robots do all the work for us!

 

[westernman]

Mind it is a truism that you can write FORTRAN in any decent language (perhaps not in LISP!)

I think you would find it a challenge to write FORTRAN in Haskell. Despite the fact that FORTRAN was designed for translating formulas.

 

[AntarcticPilot]

I think you would find it a challenge to write FORTRAN in Haskell. Despite the fact that FORTRAN was designed for translating formulas.

But what I wrote could be taken as a definition of a decent language

I think it can also be taken as a statement that no matter how function or object oriented a language is, you can still encapsulate Fortran-like structures within a function or object. I have no doubt whatsoever that C, C++ or Java written by me sometimes betrays my Fortran heritage!

 

[BrianH]

I think it can also be taken as a statement that no matter how function or object oriented a language is, you can still encapsulate Fortran-like structures within a function or object.

I can relate to that. Back in the 1980s I implemented industrial control systems programmed in my company's own compiler, UFO (Ultra FOrtran), that encapsulated code into a state/event, higher-level hierarchy - convenient for the process control and manufacturing plants we automated.

Apologies to the OP - who hardly expected his subject to be hijacked into computer program languages.

 

[prv]

I can relate to that. Back in the 1980s I implemented industrial control systems programmed in my company's own compiler, UFO (Ultra FOrtran), that encapsulated code into a state/event, higher-level hierarchy - convenient for the process control and manufacturing plants we automated.

My understanding is that RPG (which must be still going somewhere, as my colleagues in MQ still produce libraries for it) was designed to be familiar to the technicians who wired up physical plugboards to "program" the later generations of unit record equipment (ie, punchcards for actual processing, not just computer input).

Pete

 

[CAPTAIN FANTASTIC]

In a thread about languages, I'm a bit surprised at all the people who feel learning Latin has hampered their ability to learn languages. I am absolutely useless at languages - but I can communicate at a basic level anywhere in Europe precisely BECAUSE I learnt Latin at school. After all, Italian and Spanish are basically Latin with 2000 years of evolution; the Italian of the Renaissance (the language of Dante's Divine Comedy) was called Vulgar Latin! And an awful lot of common words in European languages are based on Latin or Greek roots; if you know Latin, you can work out what an awful lot of words mean.

I'm a scientist, and Latin was about my worst subject at school (I failed the exam, and only got the O-level on a retake) - but I'd actually say it has turned out to be one of the more useful O-levels that I did. However, I was lucky enough to have a very gifted Latin teacher, who even managed to inspire the poor performers in the class! And even in my scientific work, Latin and Greek are handy - I can work out what the binomial names of species mean!

Agree; I had to learn to speak and hold a conversation in Latin (boarding school) and naturally I speak fluent Greek; also the structure of Latin and the origin of most Latin words are based on the Greek language. European languages such as French, English, Spanish, Italian, Germanic and Slavic languages contain approx. 20% Greek and 20% Latin, so it is handy if one is familiar with Greek and Latin. Being an Engineering Scientist, I use Greek and Latin on the daily basis. Those who are willing to travel about and keep a boat in other countries on a long term, should make the effort to learn a bit of the local lingo; most learn English because it is a simple structure and basic language to learn and it is used throughout for communication, however, not making the effort to learn the local language is laziness, one does not have to be perfect at it; just make the effort to learn a bit.

 

[LadyInBed]

But what I wrote could be taken as a definition of a decent language

Talking of decent languages I had the dubious privilege of using MUMPS (Massachusetts General Hospital Utility Multi-Programming System), not just a language but also an operating system!