Re: A7: CDATA, RCDATA, TEMP marked sections?

At 11:34 PM 10/10/96 EDT, lee@sq.com wrote:

>
>Nouns are different from verbs, but they are not distinguished lexically in
>English.  In Sanskrit and Ancient Greek and Latin they are distinguished by
>endings; morphological tagging has tended to weaken with time, however, so
>that languages are getting less complex in this regard.

While morphological distinctions in IE languages have tended to decrease
with time, there have been compensating syantactic effects. Languages like
English (only two morphological noun cases, down from four plus remnants of
another in Anglo Saxon) or French (only one noun case, down from seven in
Latin) tend to have developed very strongly positional syntax that their
ancestors did not need. 

>In programming languages, consider
>	process(w)
>where w may be an integer or a string, but the same syntax is used.
>
>This uniform syntax is VERY highly prized in computer science.
>

Another reason why those of us trained as natural-language find programming
languages so unnatural.


Jim Mason

Dr. James D. Mason
(ISO/IEC JTC1/SC18/WG8 Convenor)
Lockheed Martin Energy Systems
Information Management Services
SGML Systems Development
1060 Commerce Park, M.S. 6480
Oak Ridge, TN  37831-6480   U.S.A.
Telephone: +1 423 574-6973
Facsimile:  +1 423 574-0004
Network: masonjd@ornl.gov

Received on Friday, 11 October 1996 09:37:06 UTC