From: Alex Ferguson (abf@cs.ucc.ie)
Date: Fri 27 Oct 2000 - 14:24:10 EEST
Richard Bourke:
> It also suggests a different language analogy than the chinese
> (logographic) versus latin(alphabetic) competitors: that of
> modern Formal Methods. (Used to specify mathematically the desired
> behaviour of, typically, a computer system). Anyone out there no
> more about these than I do ?
I dunno, how much are you going to bid knowing? ;-)
> I wouldn't push the analogy too far. Western will be used casually
> by non-mathematicians to compose reports, letters, maybe even
> Poetry. But the idea of the language carrying a grammatical structure
> that allows some proof or disproof of the statement being conveyed
> simply seems necessary, since it is used to write down spells that
> manipulate entities on the sorcery planes.
That (and your example) seem to argue simply for more detail, rather
than for a logical (in the technical sense) structure to the language.
That would imply, to me, something more like explicit quantification
and scoping to the language, for example, to avoid some of the major
gotchas of semantic disambiguation in natural language.
Cheers,
Alex.
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