Topic: Parts of Speech in Programming

The english language has many words. Each word has a designated part of speech. When these words are combined in special ways, you get a sentence.

I want to share a standard I have for translating these parts of speech into lua programming so that your code will be more readable.

NOUNS

A noun is a Person, Place, Thing, or Idea.
Variables should be named like nouns. Meet Joe:

joe =

Joe is a person, so he is a noun. We could put joe in a Person Class to make him more of a person:

joe = Person()
VERBS

Verbs are Action Words. Joe can walk and talk!
Functions should be named like verbs.

joe:Walk()
joe:Talk()
ADJECTIVES

Adjectives Describe Nouns! Joe is pale!
Use Booleans to denote adjectives.

pale = true
ADVERBS

Adverbs Describe Verbs. Joey can walk Quickly:
Once again, use Booleans to denote adverbs. If you use them as arguments for functions, it reads better. 

joe:Walk(quickly)

walk = true
quickly = true
PARTICIPLES

A participle is a tense of a verb. Is Joe biking? Or has joe biked? Usually past or present tense.
Once again, Booleans.

biking = true
biked = false
PREPOSITIONS

A preposition is a Location Word. Is joe Under the shed or In the shed? Is he Around the corner or Along the corner?
Booleans again.

under = false
around = true
CONJUNCTIONS

Conjunctions JOIN sentences (statements).
Usually Conditional Statements are the conjunctions in programming. Words like "but," "and," !because," are conjunctions. 

if joe.isWalking and joe.isWalkingQuickly then
    joe.isAfraid
end

Above, isWalking is a boolean, as well as isWalkingQuickly. Also isAfraid is a boolean. So all we are doing is setting boolean values. Starting to look like an English sentence.

INTERJECTIONS

Interjections are used to express emotion or sentiment. Uh, er, bye, hi, cheers! Horray! Wow! Sup! Oh! Well! Sorry! Oh dear!
One way to do interjections is to use Loops. Most of the time these statments stand for other things. "Wow" means that you are surprised and don't know what to say. 

surprised = true
speecheless = true

while speechless and surprised do
    LookInAmazement()
end

We could make a function called Wow() that would set these boolean variables:

function Wow()
    wowed = true
    surprised = true
    speecheless = true
    LookInAmazement()
end

joe:Wow()

Last edited by Tutorial Doctor (2013-11-12 15:47:09)