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Len, On Wed, 21 Apr 2004, Bullard, Claude L (Len) wrote: > So syntax is not trivial? Arghhh, I can't remember any longer. I think I'm arguing both that it is and that it isn't (clearly, in another life I was a theologian). It's trivial in that what really does the work is the thing the syntax is turned into -- be it SAX stream, Infoset, grove, parse-tree, chip mask(!) -- and what that was converted _from_ doesn't matter at that level. So you can make your own choice and the processor doesn't have to care. It's non-trivial in the sense that what's on the screen does matter when you're trying to debug why the parsed thing doesn't work. [add suitable qualifications to all of that] So syntax is desparately non-trivial; but because it's also trivial, that's OK. I think. (clearly, it wasn't one of the more accessible religions). The short version: the slogan `syntax is (not) trivial' means too many different things to be useful. Ermmm? Norman -- --------------------------------------------------------------------------- Norman Gray http://www.astro.gla.ac.uk/users/norman/ Physics and Astronomy, University of Glasgow, UK norman@a...
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