Re: Real languages and model planes

At 11:22 AM -0400 11/9/98, John Cowan wrote:
>David G. Durand wrote:
>> A model plane _can't_ fly. A real plane _can_ fly, even if no one ever
>> flies it.
>
>So you define.  But I see things I would call "model planes" flying
>all the time in the park.  They are models because they are
>replicas, at a smaller scales, of non-model planes.
>
>So for me "model" and "real" are not mutually exclusive.
I agree, but that wasn't the sense of model that I was responding to. I
think at least some of our "model" languages are also "real" languages.
Those concepts were being opposed to each other.

Actually, in that sense of model, I'm not sure if our languages are models,
since there's no original, never mind the idea of scale (which seems to
make sense only at the level of vocabulary).

On the other hand most model spaceships also don't have an original that
they model.

[[ heh, heh: Maybe a model is a created object, intending to replicate the
function or appearance of some other object, that may or may not exist, and
that may or may not _actually_ perform that function itself. ]]

Surprise! The word model is abiguous and interesting in itself.

I think we've moved from the sublime to the ridiculous, so I'll go back to
my lurker-cave.

  -- David

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David Durand              dgd@cs.bu.edu  \  david@dynamicDiagrams.com
Boston University Computer Science        \  Sr. Analyst
http://www.cs.bu.edu/students/grads/dgd/   \  Dynamic Diagrams
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