* Vincent Manis:
On 2009-11-14, at 01:11, Alf P. Steinbach wrote:
OK, now we've reached a total breakdown in communication, Alf. You appear
to take exception to distinguishing between a language and its implementation.
Not at all.
But that doesn't mean that making that distinction is always meaningful.
It certainly is. A language is a (normally) infinite set of strings with a way of ascribing
a meaning to each string.
A language implementation is a computer program of some sort, which is a finite set of bits
representing a program in some language, with the effect that the observed behavior of the
implementation is that strings in the language are accepted, and the computer performs the
operations defined by the semantics.
These are always different things.
Well, there you have it, your basic misconception.
Sometimes, when that's practically meaningful, people use the name of a language
to refer to both, as whoever it was did up-thread.
Or, they might mean just the latter. :-)
Apply some intelligence and it's all clear.
Stick boneheadedly to preconceived distinctions and absolute context independent
meanings, and statements using other meanings appear to be meaningless or very
unclear.
[snippety]
Cheers & hth.,
- Alf
PS: You might, or might not, benefit from looking up Usenet discussions on the
meaning of "character code", which is classic case of the confusion you have
here. There's even a discussion of that in some RFC somewhere, I think it was
MIME-related. Terms mean different things in different *contexts*.
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