RE: [xml-dev] XML CMM and ISO9000 compliance? - was A standard approach to glueing together reusableXML fragments in prose?

["Hunsberger, Peter" <Peter.Hunsberger@stjude.org>]

pop3 <mailto:lbradshaw@dbex.com> writes:

> 
> Umm, reading Knuth got me certain that _assembler_ could be 
> proven and had 
> been proven in math, from which languages like Pascal and Fortan and 
> Cobol  and C can also be, or rather have been proven, and 
> since Java is 
> just C transcendant then I feel that is also shown.
> 
> I do not feel that a markup language with patched on logic 
> capacity can be 
> mathematically shown to be a programming language at all....
> 
> Just my opinion.

Exactly what do you mean by "proven"?  There are classes of languages
that are known as "provable", meaning that they have mathematical
properties that allow one to always generate proofs that an algorithm
works or does not work for any algorithm written in those languages.  In
general, with most languages (those you list) this is not possible.

One can talk about proving that an algorithm does what you claim it
does.  One cannot talk about proving a language, since any Turing
complete language is non-bounded...