From: Hans Aberg (haberg@math.su.se)
Date: Thu Apr 21 2005 - 10:50:11 CST
At 13:55 +0200 2005/04/21, Otto Stolz wrote:
>Hans Aberg schrieb:
>>In math, changing styles usually changes the math semantics,
>>because it is used to indicate different logical objects. For
>>example, "sin" in plain or boldface would mean different things, as
>>opposed to say the natural language English, where the semantics is
>>the same word "sin". Now, in computer code, the semantics does not
>>change either, styles are only used to make the code more legible.
>>For example, a computer language would not accept "sin" in both
>>plain and boldface, and assign different meanings to the two words.
>
>This is not entirely true. There are (or rather: used to be) at least
>two computer languages that distinguish between plain and boldface words,
>viz. Algol 60 and Algol 68.
Actually, this is remarked also on
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ALGOL>. It means that a faithful ALGOL
implementation can now be done using Unicode, thanks to that the
latter now have mathematical semantic style. In fact, very
interesting. :-)
-- Hans Aberg
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.5 : Thu Apr 21 2005 - 10:51:23 CST