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by robotresearcher 38 days ago
There are syntactically well-formed C programs that are not sound programs because their behavior is undefined. Or, rephrasing: a subset of all parseable C programs contain 'do whatever, I dunno'. I interpret this as a lack of precision.

One could take the position that specifying precisely 'do whatever, I dunno' counts as perfectly precise. But then a language that was entirely UB would count as precise, which would be an odd position to hold, since you can't specify any behavior at all with it.
1 comments
gspr 37 days ago
Nobody seriously interprets "the C programming language" as "parseable C". Of course there's parseable, undefined C, and of course it's very imprecise. It's not relevant.

Now consider sound, in-spec C. Versus natural language.

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robotresearcher 36 days ago
Ok I’ll do the same move and show why it doesn’t persuade me.

Consider the subset of natural language that has strictly defined semantics. This would include, for example, talking in about the arithmetic of real numbers. The rest is not relevant to evaluating the precision of natural language.

Does that exclusion feel different in the natural language case? Why?

Perhaps it’s a matter of degree, not a categorical difference.

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gspr 32 days ago
> Consider the subset of natural language that has strictly defined semantics. This would include, for example, talking in about the arithmetic of real numbers. Does that exclusion feel different in the natural language case? Why?

Not really, no. I just think we have better ways of expressing well-defined mathematical concepts like that than natural language when the recipient is a machine.

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