This book is devoted to the topic that got me hooked on computers in
the first place: the languages by which people are able to communicate
with machines.
Rules of grammar have always fascinated me. In retrospect I think
that the most exciting days of my elementary school education came
during the seventh grade, when I was taught how to make diagrams
of English-language sentences in order to see how the various parts of
speech fit together. My friends and I would stay after class, trying to put
more and more sentences into diagrammatic form — and getting totally
confused by poetry, which seemed to break most of the rules.