* Vincent Manis:
On 2009-11-14, at 00:22, Alf P. Steinbach wrote, in response to my earlier post.
Anyways, it's a good example of focusing on irrelevant and meaningless
precision plus at the same time utilizing imprecision, higgedly-piggedly
as it suits one's argument. Mixing hard precise logic with imprecise
concepts and confound e.g. universal quantification with existential
quantification, for best effect several times in the same sentence. Like
the old Very Hard Logic + imprecision adage: "we must do something. this
is something. ergo, we must do this".
OK, now we've reached a total breakdown in communication, Alf. You appear
to take exception to distinguishing between a language and its implementation.
Not at all.
But that doesn't mean that making that distinction is always meaningful.
It's not like "there exists a context where making the distinction is not
meaningful" means that "in all contexts making the distinction is meaningful".
So considering that, my quoted comment about confounding universal
quantification with existential quantification was spot on... :-)
In some contexts, such as here, it is meaningless and just misleading to add the
extra precision of the distinction between language and implementation.
Academically it's there. But it doesn't influence anything (see below).
Providing a counter example, a really fast Python implementation for the kind of
processing mix that Google does, available for the relevant environments, would
be relevant.
Bringing in the hypothethical possibility of a future existence of such an
implementation is, OTOH., only hot air.
If someone were to apply the irrelevantly-precise kind of argument to that, then
one could say that future hypotheticals don't have anything to do with what
Python "is", today. Now, there's a fine word-splitting distinction... ;-)
My academic work, before I became a computer science/software engineering
instructor, was in programming language specification and implementation,
so I *DO* know what I'm talking about here. However, you and I apparently
are speaking on different wavelengths.
Granted that you haven't related incorrect facts, and I don't think anyone here
has, IMO the conclusions and implied conclusions still don't follow.
Cheers & hth.,
- Alf
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