- From: Jukka K. Korpela <jkorpela@cs.tut.fi>
- Date: Fri, 13 Apr 2007 23:08:33 +0300 (EEST)
- To: www-international@w3.org
- cc: ltru@lists.ietf.org
On Fri, 13 Apr 2007, Karen_Broome@spe.sony.com wrote:
> With respect to computer language snippets, isn't that what the <code> tag
> is for -- at least in XHTML?
<code> has been in HTML since the beginning, and it indeed indicates
computer code, or "computer language".
But to make things more difficult, computer code - such as program code,
operating system commands, or markup - can be regarded as being in some
human language(s) in the sense that the identifiers may have been formed
from words in human languages and the comments are written in some human
languages. Knowing the language of computer code can be relevant at least
for two purposes:
a) the understandability of the code to human readers depends on whether
they understand the human language(s) used
b) speech synthesis would benefit from the use of language information.
Moreover, a checking program could e.g. check that the code follows the
syntactic rules of the programming, command, or markup "language" _and_
check the comments using a suitable human language spelling checker.
Thus, I would say that the human language some text and the role of that
text as computer code are in a sense orthogonal.
--
Jukka "Yucca" Korpela, http://www.cs.tut.fi/~jkorpela/
Received on Friday, 13 April 2007 20:08:41 UTC