I don't think I've seen that particular scale used in the US.
My high school does grade language learners on a scale of some kind. It's the same concept, that your location on the scale is your "absolute" skill as opposed to your skill relative to your peers.
Each level of class has a certain target of proficiency on the scale.
It seems to be the new way of doing it, I was never graded on the scheme.
I think it's funny that if I Google "simplest language," then the Piraha wiki page shows up as the first result.
The wiki article then proceeds to the use the phrase "the sheer difficulty of learning the language" in the introduction.
@Calvin'sHobbies I wanted to do a challenge like that for numbers in Prelude for a couple of weeks now... I guess I'll wait a bit, because it gets boring otherwise ;)
Caltech will release admissions decisions in about 20 minutes.
Given that their freshman class is smaller than my highschool's senior class, combined with the fact that their admissions process is practically a lottery anyways, I have hope but no expectations.
I didn't really put much effort into that application either.
If none of the fancier colleges work out, I think I will probably be able to go to my state's main university, the University of South Carolina, for basically free.
@MartinBüttner One of the reasons I read in Spanish is to improve my vocabulary. And being in a book club means that I read books with more variety than I'd choose myself, which helps with that.
@PhiNotPi The simplest Turing-complete imperative language has just the instruction "subtract and branch if negative". Doesn't make it easy to use.
@PeterTaylor that's what I meant when I said it takes dedication ;) (although I guess you've got a bit less of a hard time, since you're actually living in Spain)
@Calvin'sHobbies @PhiNotPi actually, studying an hour's drive from home is quite nice. it's far enough away to justify living there, but close enough to go home whenever you need anything. ;)
Two hours is what I've heard proposed as the ideal distance. Far enough that your parents won't visit in the week, but near enough to take your laundry home at weekends ;)
the worst thing about English isn't spelling though... it's pronunciation... from what I've heard, even native speakers have no way of knowing how to pronounce a word they've never heard (well I mean, there are obvious cases... but I feel like there are more syllables with ambiguous pronunciation than with consistent pronunciation)
@MartinBüttner I think that may have changed in the past century, because IIRC there's a line in a Gilbert & Sullivan operetta which only rhymes if wind (the movement of air) is pronounced as wind (what one used to have to do to a watch).
even that is fairly subtle to my ears... you can easily get more variation than that in German vowels without anyone thinking you would have pronounced a different word. English has weirdly fine lines between different vowel sounds.
I don't think German has any pure buffalo-style sentences
You can get 6 times "fliegen" if you surround it in other words, like "Wenn hinter Fliegen Fliegen fliegen, fliegen Fliegen Fliegen hinterher." (When behind flies, flies are flying, [then] flies are flying behind flies.) ...
and there's two rather funny ones that use different words which are either pronounced the same or use the same letters. "Bismarck biss Mark, bis Mark Bismarck biss." (Bismarck bit Mark until Mark bit Bismarck.) and "Der Inder in der Inderin" (The Indian [man] inside the Indian [woman])
but otherwise, even if we have words that act as both nouns and verbs (like "buffalo"), German doesn't have those nice elliptical sentence structures where you can just leave out all the words that indicate there's a relative sentence somewhere :D
Happy 3/14/15 pi day - or at least I'd say that if I wasn't in Australia.
Actually it's the 15th over here now, so I'm slow anyway.
(Also I can't wait for the premature Monte Carlo solution of "generate random floats between 0 and 1 and keep those less than pi/4" before the OP clarifies)
Hmm CJam doesn't have complex support and Pyth doesn't have a "random float between 0 and 1"...
@Doorknob I'm one of those people who doesn't have any trouble parsing that sentence because I'm familiar with fell as a noun. I used to go fell walking every summer.
btw that's one of my favourite things about Icelandic... they've got like 15 vowel letters, but at least each letter always stands for the same sound (apart from appearing in certain fixed letter groups)
@PeterTaylor maybe you do have a problem parsing the sentence (as intended) then ;)
Input doesn't make sense in a pure functional enviroment. I've seen some challenges where input was to be read from a file or from STDIN. Are purely functional languages (that do not implement these input methods) allowed to participate?
I want to make a quine challenge to try out the new definition... but then again most generalised quines are a bit boring once you've figured out how to quine.
According to What markdown formatting features are available for Bounty remarks? only "mini"-markdown is enabled for bounty text. I just posted a bounty over on Add an option to recall moved questions, where I had composed a remark text that looked like this:
I'd like to see reconsideration o...
The only thing I understand from that badge is that if I want to answer something, I should edit it, too. I mean, I can always find something to edit, right?
@Geobits Yeah, you could... but of course what the badge is trying to enforce is that you improve the question when you answer it (because apparently, you've understood it).
I get the intent, but people are generally averse to rolling back edits unless they make it substantially worse. So I could just minor-edit my way to a badge, whether it actually helps the question or not.
Input doesn't make sense in a pure functional enviroment. I've seen some challenges where input was to be read from a file or from STDIN. Are purely functional languages (that do not implement these input methods) allowed to participate?
According to What markdown formatting features are available for Bounty remarks? only "mini"-markdown is enabled for bounty text. I just posted a bounty over on Add an option to recall moved questions, where I had composed a remark text that looked like this:
I'd like to see reconsideration o...
