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Posted by Davmon on 09/28/75 11:44
PeterMcC arranged shapes to form:
> Davémon" <"davémon wrote in
> <tihz3xfjjhds.ob1xc05r27oq.dlg@40tude.net>
>
>> PeterMcC arranged shapes to form:
>>
>>> Davémon" <"davémon wrote in
>>> <55yge2pfd8n5$.w18635w13l1c.dlg@40tude.net>
>>>
>>>> Toby Inkster arranged shapes to form:
>>>>
>>>>> Davémon wrote:
>>>>>
>>>>>> Lists with no items? That doesn't make any sense to me at all!
>>>>>
>>>>> The mathematical equivalent for the UL element would be what is
>>>>> called a "set".
>>>>>
>>>>> A set is a group of numbers/shapes/letters/vectors/whatever. Some
>>>>> examples are the set of all positive integers, the set of letters
>>>>> that directly follow vowels in the alphabet, and the set of all
>>>>> people called Kevin.
>>>>>
>>>>> The set is an abstract concept, and can be dealt with
>>>>> mathematically, in many cases without worrying about how many (if
>>>>> any) elements it contains.
>>>>
>>>> However, HTML is a language, and I don't think Language and
>>>> Mathematics are directly comparable.
>>>
>>> In lots of ways, they are.
>>>
>>>> For example, in maths, two negatives make a positive, wheras in
>>>> language (English at least) two negatives are just emphatically
>>>> negative. "I don't know nothing about it".
>>>
>>> That's a double negative - it means the positive: if I don't know
>>> *nothing* about it then I do know *something* about it.
>>
>> Among the people who use the phrase, double negatives of that kind are
>> simply emphatic, and it is /always/ understood and used as such.
>
> /Always/ might be a bit difficult to maintain, though I'd be unreasonable to
> not allow a little hyperbolic licence :)
>
Among the people who use the phrase, always.
> I agree with you entirely about usage, there are countless utterances whose
> understood meaning is not that which is literally signified by the words and
> syntax used.
>
> We see poorly structured maths, HTML, Perl, etc. that is understood by those
> who produced it - and those who look at it also understand what the writer
> intended to convey.
>
That's very true - the encoder and decoder need to have the same
understanding of the code which is being used.
With that in mind, syntactically, what does:
<ul>
<li>Oak.</li>
</ul>
convey to you that
<p>Oak.</p>
doesn't?
> The syntax and logic of the declarative "I don't know nothing" is, I think,
> clear in its literal sense.
>
I agree, but logic and syntax is of no help at all in understanding its
more common correct figurative use. Is there a similar way to use maths in
a figurative way? Does context change maths as it does language, so that
1+1 != 2 somewhere in the universe? That would make them directly
comparable.
Hmm. I like the idea of using HTML for presentational purposes as being "a
figurative use of the language".
> Then, what do I know?
>
I don't know!
--
Davémon
http://www.nightsoil.co.uk/
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