quotes about Syntax
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What makes sense is not law, syntax, rules or structure
-- Aaron Betsky -
Contrary to the foolish notion that syntax is immaterial, people optimize the way they express themselves, and so express themselves differently with different syntaxes.
-- Erik Naggum -
Each person is an idiom unto himself, an apparent violation of the syntax of the species.
-- Gordon AllportSource : Gordon Willard Allport (1955). “Becoming; Basic Considerations for a Psychology of Personality”, p.19, Yale University Press
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Don't you hate code that's not properly indented? Making it [indenting] part of the syntax guarantees that all code is properly indented.
-- Guido van Rossum -
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Yiddish has a down-to-earth quality that makes it remote from high-flown rhetoric, and it has a catch-as-catch-can charm derived from its stunning variety-of syntax, spelling, pronunciation, and vocabulary-from region to region.
-- Israel Shenker -
The Canadian dialect of English . . . seems roughly to be the result of applying British syntax to an American vocabulary.
-- Lister Sinclair -
The pull between sound and syntax creates a kind of musical tension in the language that interests me.
-- Marilyn Hacker -
A candidate for office can have no greater advantage than muddled syntax; no greater liability than a command of language.
-- Marya Mannes -
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Mr Robert Montgomery's genius [is] far too free and aspiring to be shackled by the rules of syntax? [His] readers must take such grammar as they can get and be thankful.
-- Nathan Rothschild, 1st Baron Rothschild -
It was the single forgiving phrase in the syntax of weaponry I had strapped about me. The rest were unequivocal sentences of death.
-- Richard K. MorganSource : Richard K. Morgan (2003). “Altered Carbon”, Del Rey
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It sometimes happens to me while writing, that I seek a word; mischievous as it is it appears in English, it appears in Arabic, but refuses to come in Hebrew. To some extent I made up my Hebrew. Unquestionably, the influence of Arabic is dominant, my syntax is almost Arabic.
-- Sami Michael -
Our memory fragments don't have any coherence until they're imagined in words. Time is a property of language, of syntax, and tense.
-- Siri Hustvedt -
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Bad writing is more than a matter of (expletive deleted) syntax and faulty observation; bad writing usually arises from a stubborn refusal to tell stories about what people actually do to face the fact, let us say, that murderers sometimes help old ladies cross the street.
-- Stephen King -
Most students of literature can pick apart a metaphor or spot an ethnic stereotype, but not many of them can say things like: 'The poem's sardonic tone is curiously at odds with its plodding syntax.
-- Terry Eagleton -
The American constitutions were to liberty, what a grammar is to language: they define its parts of speech, and practically construct them into syntax
-- Thomas Paine -
Certain individual words do possess more pitch, more radiance, more shazam! than others, but it's the way words are juxtaposed with other words in a phrase or sentence that can create magic. Perhaps literally. The word "grammar," like its sister word "glamour," is actually derived from an old Scottish word that meant "sorcery." When we were made to diagram sentences in high school, we were unwittingly being instructed in syntax sorcery, in wizardry. We were all enrolled at Hogwarts. Who knew?
-- Tom Robbins -
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Amid chaos of images, we value coherence. We believe in the printed word. And we believe in clarity. And we believe in immaculate syntax. And in the beauty of the English language.
-- William Shawn -
Prose is not necessarily good because it obeys the rules of syntax, but it is fairly certain to be bad if it ignores them.
-- Wilson Follett -
I see the origin of the irresistible attraction of metaphor and analogy, the explanation of our strange and permanent need to find similarities in things. I can scarcely refrain from suspecting some ancient, diffused magnetism; a call from the center of things; a dim, almost lost memory, or perhaps a presentiment, pointless in so puny a being, of a universal syntax.
-- Roger CailloisSource : Roger Caillois (1985). “The writing of stones”, Univ of Virginia Pr
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The use of the high level language made each programmer a factor of 5 to 10 more productive in a coding sense and more concerned with the semantics than the syntax of modules.
-- Fernando J. CorbatoSource : "A Managerial View of the Multics System Development". Talk at the Conference on Research Directions in Software Technology, Providence, Rhode Island, www.multicians.org. October 1977.
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