Hacker Newsnew | past | comments | ask | show | jobs | submitlogin

Nobody seriously interprets "the C programming language" as "parseable C". Of course there's parseable, undefined C, and of course it's very imprecise. It's not relevant.

Now consider sound, in-spec C. Versus natural language.



Ok I’ll do the same move and show why it doesn’t persuade me.

Consider the subset of natural language that has strictly defined semantics. This would include, for example, talking in about the arithmetic of real numbers. The rest is not relevant to evaluating the precision of natural language.

Does that exclusion feel different in the natural language case? Why?

Perhaps it’s a matter of degree, not a categorical difference.


> Consider the subset of natural language that has strictly defined semantics. This would include, for example, talking in about the arithmetic of real numbers. Does that exclusion feel different in the natural language case? Why?

Not really, no. I just think we have better ways of expressing well-defined mathematical concepts like that than natural language when the recipient is a machine.




Guidelines | FAQ | Lists | API | Security | Legal | Apply to YC | Contact

Search: