Re: [xml-dev] The semantics of an XML document is …
On Mon, Jan 10, 2022 at 11:00 AM Norman Gray <[email protected]> wrote:
Greetings.
In a computing context, I've always taken 'semantics' to refer to everything 'above' the level of 'syntax', in a cheerfully hand-waving way.
Thus
2 + 2
is a legal string of arithmetic tokens, in the syntax we learned in primary school, and
2 2 +
isn't. Choosing to interpret one or both of these token-streams as an arithmetic expression is a semantic act. If we've heard of reverse-polish notation, then we may additionally recognise the second stream as a legal stream in that syntax, in which case we will ascribe to the second stream the same semantics -- the same meaning/implication/truth-value/blah -- as the first.
...and then you encounter one of them horrible i++ vs ++i languages.