[Interspel] "Instant English"

As none of you-all know, I am a proponent of Interspel, a proposal by Valerie Yule to standardize the subset of English spelling which even literate native speakers have perpetual problems with. I'll link to Interspel's Wikipedia entry below.

Anyway, I recently heard a comment about how Instant Message English -- I'll call it Instant English -- tends to be far too "cooked down" to be much use beyond vapid grunts. The example given was:

u r, u no (i.e. you are, you know)

It's quite terse. Too terse, too ambiguous beyond very simple replies. However, the principles are sound: remove useless letters. And if the vocabulary grows, perhaps it will grow alongside 20th-Century English Spelling, or even replace some of it.

Hopefully for the better.

Interspel entry in Wikipedia

My Data-Only Object Notation Converter

Here's my home-rolled method for serializing a data-only object to PON (Perl Object Notation) or JSON. "Data-Only" means that the object only contains scalars, hashes, and arrays -- no classes.

   // to output JSON, pass in a pair of ":" instead of "=>".
   private function encodePON( obj:Object, pair:String="=>" ):String
   {
    if ( obj is String ) return "'" + obj + "'";
    if ( obj is Number ) return obj.toString();
    
    var out:String = "";
    var ary:Array;
    
    if ( obj is Array )
    {
     out += "[";
     ary = new Array();
     for each (var item:Object in obj as Array)
      ary.push( encodePON( item ) );
     out += ary.join( ", " );
     out += "]";
    }  
    else if ( obj is Object )
    {
     out += "{";
     ary = new Array();
     for (var key:String in obj)
      ary.push( "'" + key + "' " + pair + " " + encodePON( obj[key] ) );
     out += ary.join( ", " );
     out += "}";
    }
    
    return out;
   }

Tyro posts an empty message

So this is my third blog, mainly to have a place to put stuff and to reference other stuff. After my utter failure at keeping up my Ruby blog and my Flex blog, I figure something generalist would do better.

Worth a try.

Programming Community HotList for February 2010

Need a skill for a programming job? Here's your most likely "best" choices:

25% - Java
17% - JavaScript
12% - VisualBasic/C#
10% - PHP
10% - Ruby
8% - ActionScript
7% - Perl
5% - C/C++
5% - Python
2% - Delphi/Pascal

Feel free to quote me on that :)