[krapp]

As far as I know a "character" is a number in a character set. "A character is a character because it's a character" doesn't make any sense, at least not in the context of a programming language. A character is a character because it maps to a letter or glyph, and that requires a specific encoding.

The Bel spec contains the following:

    2. chars

    A list of all characters. Its elements are of the form (c . b), where
    c is a character and b is its binary representation in the form of a 
    string of \1 and \0 characters. 

In other words, even in Bel a character is still a "number" in a character set encoding. The "binary representation" isn't mentioned as being a specific encoding, which means it's assumed to be UTF08 or ASCII.

Also, Bel does have numbers, apparently implemented as pairs. Go figure.

[partdavid]

You're right that I need to review more of the Bel spec (which as you point out does in fact implement numbers).

But I am trying to read this in the spirit in which it's intended, as irreducible axioms. And so I don't think it's true that a character needs a representation from the perspective of Bel.

Consider if pg had approached this more like I would have, and started with integers and not characters as a built-in. Does an integer need a "representation"? At least, in a language that is not designed to execute programs in, like Bel? An implementation (with the additional constraints like width, BCD vs two's complement vs whatever, radix, etc) would need one, but the formal description would not.

Thanks for exploring the subject.

[fao_]

> You're right that I need to review more of the Bel spec (which as you point out does in fact implement numbers).

Can I ask why you claimed that it didn't have numbers or characters? It seems an odd thing to claim without actually having that knowledge in the first place.

[krapp]

To be fair, numbers aren't listed in the spec initially as one of its basic types (and they aren't, they're implemented as pairs, which are a basic type) and no one is disputing that Bel has characters, just whether it's appropriate to mention character encodings for what seems to be intended to be mostly an academic exercise.