Wednesday, May 27, 2015

Fiat pax in virtute tua

I had no idea that a natural language could have an actual assignment operator (that is, something like e.g. "LET x = 10" or "x <- 10" in programming languages), until I've discovered than Latin does. It's done through the word fiat. So, for example, "Thy will be done" is fiat voluntas tua, and "let there be light" is fiat lux. I like that a lot.

(You might object that this isn't really assignment since it seems to be just saying "LET x" as opposed to "LET x = y". But it is; it's just that, as is usually the case with natural languages, a lot is left implicit. For example, what fiat lux is really saying is something like "LET new state of the world = old state of the world + light".)

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