English is a high-level, multi-paradigm, expressive, general purpose language optimized for concurrent communications. English has been successfully used in a wide variety of scenarios, such as long-term data storage, analog and digital arts, and text-based adventures, to name a few. To date, English is used on more than 1,456 million carbon-based devices, and powers more than five million books.

English has been designed over the course of fourteen centuries. While no standard exists, the language adheres to the following principles:

• Portability: English follows a Write Once, Read Anywhere, Then Rewrite (WORATR) philosophy.
• Extensibility: Like Lua, English can borrow constructs and keywords from other languages.
• Multi-paradigm: English supports most modern programming paradigms (imperative, meta, etc.)
• Resilience: English programs can execute on organic hardware despite severe syntax errors.
• Polymorphism: English evolves over time without having to refactor existing codebases.

English’s stability makes it ideal for long-term projects where data integrity is more important than precision: The last breaking change in the specifications happened five centuries ago and there are no plans for further major releases.

English’s mantra is “there’s more than one way to say it”.

Syntax

This is a typical English program that implements the Frost pathfinding algorithm:

Two roads diverged in a yellow wood,
And sorry I could not travel both
And be one traveler, long I stood
And looked down one as far as I could
To where it bent in the undergrowth;

Then took the other, as just as fair,
And having perhaps the better claim,
Because it was grassy and wanted wear;
Though as for that the passing there
Had worn them really about the same,

And both that morning equally lay
In leaves no step had trodden black.
Oh, I kept the first for another day!
Yet knowing how way leads on to way,
I doubted if I should ever come back.

I shall be telling this with a sigh
Somewhere ages and ages hence:
Two roads diverged in a wood, and I—
I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference.

English uses whitespace and commas to delimit words, relying heavily on punctuation. Statements can end with a period or, less frequently, with a semicolon. Blocks are usually separated by two or more line breaks. Correct statements are always written in sentence case.

Operators

English uses the following operators:

• !: Emphasize execution (similar to CSS’s !important). Can be stacked
• ?: Request information or open data stream thread. Can be stacked
• ,: Concatenate statements in the same block
• .: End of statement
• ;: End of statement (weak)
• :: Definition, for example for functions or clauses
• ...: Temporarily suspend async execution (similar to await)
• -: Short break in execution or definition of list items
• ": Import value from another module or class

Code comments are added using parentheses or round brackets. Unlike other programming languages, English executes code comments with lower priority to enrich execution context and debug logging. For example:

English operators can be overloaded, although this is not recommended by the ENG23 committee.

Statements and control flow

English statements are free-form and its execution depends on the interpreter’s training, as well as word order. Conditional execution and exception handling also depend on the mood and tense of the keywords, as well as resources available.

Keywords

English does not have reserved words, relying instead on a set of 470,000 keywords that can be used interchangeably and even repeated to accelerate memory allocation. The training process results in scores that make the usage of certain keywords less likely. Keywords that score higher in the profanity dimension might cause the system to panic.

Data structures

English only has