xml-dev - Re: Semantics (was Re: Inheritance in XML [^*])

[Sean Mc Grath <digitome@iol.ie>]

[David Meginnson]
>
>It seems to me that semantics and syntax are fuzzy sets (like "tall"
>and "short") rather than crisp sets (like "greater than zero" or "less
>than zero").
>
>In the SGML/XML world, we somehow know what we mean when we talk about
>"syntax" and "semantics", but as this discussion has shown, it's hard
>to quantify _how_ we know what we know, and in the end, it turns out
>that we have simply set an arbitrary boundary and silently agreed to
>enforce it.

Yes. Same probably goes for every other field that requires to give
a syntactic form to an abstraction. Math for example.

This comment is from section 1.4 of the  MathML spec:-

"The relationship between a mathematical notation and a mathematical idea
is subtle and deep. On a formal level, the results of mathematical logic
raise profound and unsettling questions about the correspondence between
symbolic logic systems and the phenomena they model."

I read this to mean that syntax and semantics are interwoven at a level
of intricacy beyond most of us. Certainly beyond me:-)



xml-dev: A list for W3C XML Developers. To post, mailto:xml-dev@ic.ac.uk
Archived as: http://www.lists.ic.ac.uk/hypermail/xml-dev/
To (un)subscribe, mailto:majordomo@ic.ac.uk the following message;
(un)subscribe xml-dev
To subscribe to the digests, mailto:majordomo@ic.ac.uk the following message;
subscribe xml-dev-digest
List coordinator, Henry Rzepa (mailto:rzepa@ic.ac.uk)