[antlr-interest] ITLS (was: Translators Should Use Tree Grammars)

[Anthony Youngman]

And to add my tuppence-worth, speaking as an *engineer* (actually,
scientist by training), the computer mathematicians are making exactly
the same mistake as the hardware people, namely a belief in abstraction
...

Okay, I'm more into database theory, but you're talking about logic,
symbolism and abstraction - all branches of PURE mathematics. Where is
the *scientific* evidence that all this maths is *relevant* to problem
in hand (stuff like experiment, statistics, etc etc).

My favourite example that I always quote is Newtonian Mechanics. Viewed
as an exercise in Maths, it's perfect. Can anybody point out any
*mathematical* flaws in its arguments? Yet viewed as an exercise in
*science*, it's irrelevant in many cases because it just doesn't
describe the world as it is.

Sorry if I'm drifting way off topic, but I really get wound up when
people seek to justify their world view through mathematics. There's a
very big gulf between *correct* maths and *relevant* maths, and too many
people seem to think that just because it's the former, it has to be the
latter too. (Look at modern physics - we have many "correct" theories,
we're just trying to work out which ones are "relevant".)

Cheers,
Wol

-----Original Message-----
From: John D. Mitchell [mailto:johnm-antlr at non.net] 
Sent: 22 November 2004 18:25
To: antlr-interest at yahoogroups.com
Subject: Re: [antlr-interest] ITLS (was: Translators Should Use Tree
Grammars)


[For the "linguists" in the audience, let me humbly suggest looking at
the
history and evolution of programming languages slightly differently...
There are two primary thrusts of GPPL development, mathematics (formal
logic, symbolism, abstractionism) and hardware abstraction (performance,
mechanistic, conformist).  All GPPLs are some combination of the
tradeoffs
between those two (often conflicting) needs.  Given the historical lack
of
hardware horsepower, it's no wonder that the hardware abstraction camp
has
been so dominant.  This left the abstract, mathematics school of thought
on
the mostly research fringe where they've had to watch their old ideas
get
"rediscovered" (usually poorly :-) by succeeding generations of the
popular
GPPLs.  Structured programming, functional programming,
meta-programming,
dynamic languages, OOP, OOD, patterns, etc.  So far, that all is fairly
commonly understood.  Now, take a step to the left and look again at
that
evolution in terms of how all of those approaches are about trying to
get a
grip on the real languages that the programmers are trying to create and
manipulate to develop (as) their systems.]



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