Re: Programming language specification languages

rkrayhawk@aol.com (RKRayhawk) schreibt:


>To the exact point of precision in specifications, do we not constrict
>precision if the core tokens are so coarse?
>
>And the substantives that will be operated upon, are we not interested
>in a much larger symbol set in the world market, ... regardless of
>whether the tools known as markup language are utilized in language
>development?


I cannot find any substantial problems here, when we distinguish
between the internal data structures and operations, and the textual
representation in any source code. A lexer creates abstract tokens
from the source literals, and any further processing only deals with
these tokens, independently from the input character set.


Likewise we should distinguish between specification languages and
source languages. A program, written in a single-byte-character
language, can process text of any character set, or even non-character
input, provided that the appropriate data handling procedures are
available.


IMO huge "character" sets are a dead end, because any new "word"
(substantive...) requires either a new glyph, or it must be
circumscribed by multiple existing glyphs. Whatever way you choose,
you always must define the new glyphs or words in well known
terms. It's only a matter of taste and/or custom, whether you prefer
to add new characters or new glyphs to a language. For me the rich
toolbars of many programs are unusable, because their glyphs
(bitmaps...) have no intuitive meaning to me, and the same glyphs
often have a different meaning in different programs :-(


DoDi

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