formal language descriptions

[Henry Spencer]

In article <1214 at garth.UUCP> smryan at garth.UUCP (Steven Ryan) writes:
>>It is also a booby-trap which has been loudly criticized, even by prominent
>>mathematicians, for making the literature of the field useless to anyone
>>but narrow specialists.  Concise formalisms are necessary but not sufficient.
>
>Because it is hard, therefore it should not be done.
>It is hard to comment a program, therefore it shouldn't be done.

Please re-read the last sentence of what I wrote.  It should be done, *but*
it is not the whole job.

>No direct response to assertion that is done to keep the writer honest and
>perhaps that's why language designer avoid it.

No direct response to assertion that making one's work useful requires doing
more than just a formal definition.

>... But formalisation
>makes it possible to argue rationally over some point. The question can be
>resolved by examining the arguments within the context of a public
>definition.

This assumes that the public definition is complete, correct, and self-
consistent.  That is not a trivial assumption, indeed it is a large and
somewhat dubious one, especially when considering existing (relatively
large and warty) languages like C.
-- 
Intel CPUs are not defective,  |     Henry Spencer at U of Toronto Zoology
they just act that way.        | uunet!attcan!utzoo!henry henry at zoo.toronto.edu