Saturday, July 21, 2007

Parlance of iidiom

Idiom" can also refer to the characteristic manner of speaking in a language, also called its parlance. Parlance is a word which originates from the Latin root "purl-", to speak. An utterance consistent with a language's parlance is described as idiomatic. For example, "I have hunger" is idiomatic in several European languages if translated literally (e.g. Dutch ik heb honger, German ich habe Hunger; French j'ai faim; Spanish tengo hambre; Italian ho fame), but the usual English idiom is "I am hungry".

This sense is also carried over to programming languages, where the former sense does not apply as an expression or statement in a programming language can generally have only one meaning. For example, in Haskell, it is possible to apply a function to all members of a list using recursion, but it is more idiomatic to use the higher-order function map.

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