From owner-freebsd-chat Sun Feb 9 11:12:12 2003 Delivered-To: freebsd-chat@freebsd.org Received: from mx1.FreeBSD.org (mx1.freebsd.org [216.136.204.125]) by hub.freebsd.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id EF2FF37B401 for ; Sun, 9 Feb 2003 11:12:10 -0800 (PST) Received: from falcon.midgard.homeip.net (h76n3fls20o913.telia.com [213.67.148.76]) by mx1.FreeBSD.org (Postfix) with SMTP id 2214243F85 for ; Sun, 9 Feb 2003 11:12:06 -0800 (PST) (envelope-from ertr1013@student.uu.se) Received: (qmail 37996 invoked by uid 1001); 9 Feb 2003 19:12:04 -0000 Date: Sun, 9 Feb 2003 20:12:03 +0100 From: Erik Trulsson To: Rahul Siddharthan Cc: Mark Murray , Dag-Erling Smorgrav , chat@freebsd.org Subject: Re: languages Message-ID: <20030209191203.GA37952@falcon.midgard.homeip.net> References: <20030209181722.GA19704@papagena.rockefeller.edu> <200302091826.h19IQBaX035066@grimreaper.grondar.org> <20030209184658.GA19887@papagena.rockefeller.edu> Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=iso-8859-1 Content-Disposition: inline Content-Transfer-Encoding: quoted-printable In-Reply-To: <20030209184658.GA19887@papagena.rockefeller.edu> User-Agent: Mutt/1.5.3i Sender: owner-freebsd-chat@FreeBSD.ORG Precedence: bulk List-ID: List-Archive: (Web Archive) List-Help: (List Instructions) List-Subscribe: List-Unsubscribe: X-Loop: FreeBSD.org 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: >=20 > Presumably in some DTD somewhere? That's possible with XML (hence > "extensible") >=20 > > 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. >=20 > Well, it's explained later in "Through the looking glass", and some > of it even got into the dictionary later ("chortle", "galumph"). >=20 > 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. >=20 > I think language is a structure *and* a meaning, but the meaning > doesn't necessarily come from an authoritative dictionary (though the > Academie Fran=E7aise 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 stri= ng.) 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. --=20 Erik Trulsson ertr1013@student.uu.se To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-chat" in the body of the message