Newsgroups: comp.lang.c Path: utzoo!henry From: henry@utzoo.uucp (Henry Spencer) Subject: Re: formal language descriptions Message-ID: <1988Aug19.184542.21200@utzoo.uucp> Organization: U of Toronto Zoology References: <1112@garth.UUCP> <1988Aug2.233758.25939@utzoo.uucp> <1151@garth.UUCP> <1988Aug7.004203.7178@utzoo.uucp> <1187@garth.UUCP> <1988Aug10.195750.22978@utzoo.uucp> <1214@garth.UUCP> Date: Fri, 19 Aug 88 18:45:42 GMT In article <1214@garth.UUCP> smryan@garth.UUCP (Steven Ryan) writes: >>It is also a booby-trap which has been loudly criticized, even by prominent >>mathematicians, for making the literature of the field useless to anyone >>but narrow specialists. Concise formalisms are necessary but not sufficient. > >Because it is hard, therefore it should not be done. >It is hard to comment a program, therefore it shouldn't be done. Please re-read the last sentence of what I wrote. It should be done, *but* it is not the whole job. >No direct response to assertion that is done to keep the writer honest and >perhaps that's why language designer avoid it. No direct response to assertion that making one's work useful requires doing more than just a formal definition. >... But formalisation >makes it possible to argue rationally over some point. The question can be >resolved by examining the arguments within the context of a public >definition. This assumes that the public definition is complete, correct, and self- consistent. That is not a trivial assumption, indeed it is a large and somewhat dubious one, especially when considering existing (relatively large and warty) languages like C. -- Intel CPUs are not defective, | Henry Spencer at U of Toronto Zoology they just act that way. | uunet!attcan!utzoo!henry henry@zoo.toronto.edu