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Re: [xsl] The Oxford Comma - A Gift Worth Atleast 5 Cents

2008-06-19 22:33:31
Hi Colin,

I would think that it is more than just orthography, what about punctuation rules (like in this case), syntax, phonetics, prosody, intonations (at least in some languages), and even vocabulary where it is hard to find a word, in any human language, that has a single clear meaning and whose definition does not refer to many other terms and definitions that are just as imprecise, ambiguous, and also based on other terms that are as ...? Why is it so hard to understand each other, when we speak the same language, in the same family, for example? It seems that the structure of languages could be factor.

As for reading XML, and talking about blurred communications, it is surprisingly easy to learn to "blur" in your mind the parts that are not currently relevant. With everything blurred in human languages we work to "figure out" logic, structure, and meaning from the blur, but with a clearer language structure, we have to learn to blur what we do not need, to better get to the meaning. When it comes to communication blur, I think that I prefer having the choice.

Cheers,
ac



Colin Paul Adams a écrit :
"ac" == ac  <ac(_at_)hyperbase(_dot_)com> writes:


    ac> and that, although English is not the worse, human languages
    ac> have relatively little to do with logic and structure since
    ac> they are built from arbitrary usage and tradition, not
    ac> structure and logic (although some have tried).  Esperanto is
    ac> the best. Yet, as some have proposed, its accented letters
    ac> could easily be replaced with unaccented letters, making
    ac> digital life easier for users, if it was not for the Esperanto
    ac> tradition ...

You are talking about orthography here, not language.
Natural languages tend to have a lot to do with logic (the logic of
communication).
    ac> Programming languages always carry quite a bit of tradition
    ac> also but at least, they usually have some structure and logic.

But the logic has a different basis - fundamentally, they must be
parsed in a non-ambiguous way - humans can cope, and even delight in
(puns) ambiguity in the language. This is very much harder for
computer-language parsers.

    ac> Standardized and XML-based, XSLT (2) is quite nice to process
    ac> and transform, at least relatively to most other languages.

But it's not nearly so nice to read, because of the XML syntax.

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