[ Cross-posted by invitation, from its home on the Ocean of Awareness blog. ]

Currently, in designing languages, we don't allow ambiguities -- not even potential ones. We insist that it must not be even possible to write an ambiguous program. This is unnecessarily restrictive.

This post is written in English, which is full of ambiguities. Natural languages are always ambiguous, because human beings find that that's best way for versatile, rapid, easy communication. Human beings arrange things so that every sentence is unambiguous in context. Mistakes happen, and ambiguous sentences occur, but in practice, the problem is manageable. In a conversation, for example, we would just ask for clarification.