Indices.

Indexes, indices, who cares? Both plural forms are valid.

The letter 'x' is jarring and hard on the eyes, and some individuals of lesser intestinal constitude have been known to swoon at the sight of it -- which explains why it is rarely used in English spelling. It lacks the well-rounded aesthetic qualities brought by the letter 'c'. As such, alternative spellings containing the letter 'c' should be preferred at all times, except when using a well-crafted proportional font. 'ex' just kerns better than 'ic', so the general rule of thumb should be : 'indexes' when using proportional font and 'indices' in fix-width font. Feel free to alternate the spelling as required by the textual layout of your document. It was good enough for Shakespeare, it should be good enough for you.

the then not-yet-existent English

Some people find the use of "existent" in place of "extant" disturbing, too.

I think this conversation about different forms of words being either correct usage or incorrect usage illustrates a relevant point to the topic at hand, that language is diverse, and that there are standards to spoken languages, and that people sometimes do not use those standards for simplicity (thus the birth of slang).

Perhaps shorthand or weird conventions is the "slang effect" that happens in language? Grammar folks would hate it with a passion, but perhaps some people are just content with using the slang shortcuts, or "less-grammatically-correct-cuts."

language is diverse

the then not-yet-existent English

Some people find the use of "existent" in place of "extant" disturbing, too.

reminds me of something:

a few times, I had thought it would be nice if there were a variant of English sufficiently nailed down as to make machine processing a little more viable.

in a few past efforts, while it isn't too hard to nail down the grammar (such as to allow sentences to be parsed unambiguously with a recursive descent parser), there was a much bigger problem in this:

how to represent the language semantics in a way which is "actually useful" for machine processing (IIRC, I tried fitting it onto a model based around a class/instance inheritance model, but quickly ran into problems, and wasn't really interested in all the usual AI research so much as being able to use natural language phrases like a data-structure and having a semantic model reasonably straightforward to work with from code).

this was, however many years ago this was.

well, then there were my past attempts at writing speech synthesis stuff and trying to get "reasonably intelligible" output, which is itself annoyingly difficult. best results I have had thus far had been using a diphone-based system with mostly scavenged diphones, but the intelligibility isn't particularly great.

a few informal/incomplete efforts would have involved simplifying the phonology slightly (reducing the number of secondary consonant and vowel sounds), and trying to roughly shoehorn the language into a system of fixed syllables (vaguely similar to something part-way between the Japanese kana system and Korean Hangul system). this could possibly make words sound "weird", but my estimate was that overall intelligibility should be higher (less clipping in the middle of a vowel or consonant to mess it up, though possibly still with some CV-VC clips and similar).

never really invested the effort in working much on it much, and general responses from people were like "who cares?...".

but, why does working with natural language have to be so difficult?...

Use longer names instead of single letter variables. Consider replacing

a with alpha

b with beta

d with delta

etc.

Please don't. It can be a nightmare if someone else gets working on the project with you.

Beta and Bravo, Alpha and Alfa, Gamma or Charlie and Char. It was painful trying to be sure who was talking about what.

I.Really.Hate.Long.References.That.Do.Not.Tell.You.What.You.Are.Calling();

Use more expressive names instead of ambiguous single letter variables. Consider replacing

a with ?

b with ?

d with ?

etc.

Fixed.