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From: oz@yunexus.yorku.ca (Ozan Yigit)
Newsgroups: comp.lang.misc
Subject: Re: Complexity of syntax
Message-ID: <19892@yunexus.YorkU.CA>
Date: 6 Jan 91 21:54:59 GMT
References: <13857:Jan506:12:5891@kramden.acf.nyu.edu> <1991Jan5.081755.23488@agate.berkeley.edu> <14679:Jan509:13:1391@kramden.acf.nyu.edu> <1991Jan6.033646.9847@agate.berkeley.edu> <50360@cornell.UUCP>
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In article <50360@cornell.UUCP> hilfingr@cs.cornell.edu
(Paul N. Hilfinger) writes:

|> ... As a result, the term "syntax" really is used by some
|> to include static semantic properties.

I think, for the purposes of the current discussion (whatever that was)
the terminology must converge at some point, from a study in sublety of
meaning [which I sincerely doubt is attributable to any of the posters in
the current discussion] to something we can all use to communicate and
accomplish whatever we are after.

|> The distinction between "syntax" and "semantics" is fuzzy.  Syntax is
|> supposed to be "structure" and semantics is supposed to be "meaning".

Right. Here is what in Stoy[1] has to say in this topic:

   Syntax deals with the free properties of a language. The sorts of
   question that arise here are: is X a grammatically correct program?
   What are the proper subexpressions of the expression E?
   
   The semantics of a language attempts to give the language an
   interpretation, and to supply a meaning, or value, to the expressions,
   programs etc. in the language.
   
   The boundary between sytax and semantics is a bit fuzzy in places.
   For example, is the question whether the occurence of a name is within
   the the scope of some definition of that name a matter of syntax or
   semantics?  We could regard it as a (context-sensitive) syntactic
   question, or we could do as most compilers do, and make it part of the
   semantics. We should not be worried by the fuzziness, however: the
   distinction remains obvious, important and useful for the majority of
   the cases.
   ...


I hope this is good enough to get to some sort of agreement as to what we
mean when we say "syntax", and "semantics".

oz
---
[1] Stoy, Joseph E., Denotational Semantics: The Scott-Strachey
Approach to Programming Language Theory, MIT Press, Cambridge, Mass. 1977
---
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