On Tuesday 14 November 2006 09:24, Kai Ponte wrote:
...
I know this should be going OT, but PLEASE tell us how we're wrong.
I've been doing software only since the late '70s so I'm a bit of a newbie, but I've always been using text editors and copyrights for it. AFAIK, I've always used either ASCII or EBCDIC to write (notice that word) programs.
At some point, the programs got compiled into some un-readable machine code, but prior they were just text. Just words and symbols.
Symbols and text are not synonymous. Symbols are a formal concept. Their properties are that you can distinguish one symbol from another and that you can use them to refer to or stand in for content. They have not intrinsic meaning. Their meaning derives entirely by what you say about them. Text is a way (only one way) of annotating symbols and of specifying symbol (processing) systems (i.e., computer programs).
The way I see it - unless you're flipping switches on an Altair 8000 (which could be patented) then you're writing text.
That is just the point. The means of conveyance, switches, typing, speech recognition, OCR of a hand-written page, are all irrelevant. They produce the same result, a digital representation within a computer of an algorithm. And the essence of algorithms are logic. They are not intrinsically textual. The text is just to accommodate human cognitive and perceptual strengths and weaknesses. Randall Schulz --------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse+unsubscribe@opensuse.org For additional commands, e-mail: opensuse+help@opensuse.org