Date: Sun, 9 Feb 2003 20:12:03 +0100 From: Erik Trulsson <ertr1013@student.uu.se> To: Rahul Siddharthan <rsidd@online.fr> Cc: Mark Murray <mark@grondar.org>, Dag-Erling Smorgrav <des@ofug.org>, chat@freebsd.org Subject: Re: languages Message-ID: <20030209191203.GA37952@falcon.midgard.homeip.net> In-Reply-To: <20030209184658.GA19887@papagena.rockefeller.edu> References: <20030209181722.GA19704@papagena.rockefeller.edu> <200302091826.h19IQBaX035066@grimreaper.grondar.org> <20030209184658.GA19887@papagena.rockefeller.edu>
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On Sun, Feb 09, 2003 at 01:46:58PM -0500, Rahul Siddharthan wrote:
> Mark Murray wrote:
> > Dag-Erling Smorgrav writes:
> > > All right, show me where in the XML 1.0 specification the
> > > interpretation of the following snippet of XML described:
>
> Presumably in some DTD somewhere? That's possible with XML (hence
> "extensible")
>
> > Where in a dictionary is the meaning of Jabberwocky explained?
> >
> > 'Twas brillig. and the slithy toves did gimble on the gyre....
> >
> > Language is a structure, not necessarily a meaning.
>
> Well, it's explained later in "Through the looking glass", and some
> of it even got into the dictionary later ("chortle", "galumph").
>
> The newspeak words in Burgess's "A clockwork orange" aren't in fact
> explained anywhere -- the reader understands them by context. But
> they still have a meaning. Ditto with some of Edward Lear's nonsense.
>
> I think language is a structure *and* a meaning, but the meaning
> doesn't necessarily come from an authoritative dictionary (though the
> Academie Française may disagree)
The definition of "language" in mathematics (which is also used in
computer science) is as follows:
An alphabet L is a finite non-empty set of symbols.
Let L* be the set of all strings of elements in L (including the empty string.)
A _language_ over L is a subset of L*.
Note that this is a very broad definition and does not concern itself
with any meaning of a language.
For example does "All strings containing exactly 2 instances of the
letter 'a'" define a language over the alphabet {a,b,d,@,2,k}. Not a
very useful or interesting language, but a language anyway.
So, yes, HTML and XML are languages. They might not be programming
languages but they are certainly languages.
--
<Insert your favourite quote here.>
Erik Trulsson
ertr1013@student.uu.se
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