On Wed, May 16, 2012 at 07:17:04AM -0700, Dave Crocker wrote:
Case does not define meaning in normal language, why should it here?
That is false. Consider these two passages:
The King asked the Queen,
and the Queen asked the dairy-maid …
vs
The king asked the queen,
and the queen asked the dairy-maid…
The King is not the kind and the Queen is not the queen, and you can
tell just by virtue of the initial capital letter (and though you
can't tell which king or queen, you can tell for sure which King and
which Queen. The King has no current referent, rather like Russell's
present King of France, bald or otherwise). What's more, you can tell
which dairy-maid in the first passage (by virtue of relation to the
Queen) but not in the second.
But your claim is actually a symptom of the disease you've diagnosed:
computers obliterated distinctions that are important in the writing
of natural languages, mostly because case transformation for ASCII was
a trivial task and treating these differences as meaningless saved
some work. Many have stopped treating case as meaningful.
Since the task of written specification is to be as clear as possible,
I have to agree with your conclusion, despite disagreeing with the
premise: the lower case form of a protocol word will confuse people
too, and therefore we mustn't rely on case alone to carry the freight.
Use other words.
Because, after all, technical specification language is already such
elegant prose, maintaining that elegance is more important than
robustly encoding the semantic of being normative in a way that
avoids ambiguity?
One dreams of a period in which precision and elegance were not
mutually exclusive properties.
Best,
A
--
Andrew Sullivan
ajs(_at_)anvilwalrusden(_dot_)com