[Jtsummers]

If I understand yc-kjh's point, their "semantics" are really just more complicated syntactic rules. No real understanding occurs within the code. Or, the code doesn't understand what it's doing it's just doing what it's been instructed to do by us. (On that note, the code doesn't understand anything because the code is a non-entity, it's a thing, like a book or a car engine. A car engine doesn't understand the fuel it's burning or the gears it's turning or why, it just does it because that's what it does.)

[eli_gottlieb]

>If I understand yc-kjh's point, their "semantics" are really just more complicated syntactic rules. No real understanding occurs within the code.

Excuse me, but did you actually intend to express that anything which can be encoded in second-order logic is just syntax and has no semantic meaning? Because a reasonably sophisticated type system can in fact express arbitrary propositions in second-order logic; the resulting compiler might have undecidable type inference or checking, but it will in fact be following second-order logic.

[Jtsummers]

No. I actually disagree with the point. I was trying to provide an interpretation of what had been written by the OP. And based off their response, my interpretation matched their intended meaning.

EDIT: I wrote this when I wasn't fully awake. I agree with the OP slightly, but that's because the OP is using "semantics" in a different way than how computer scientists (like myself) would use it. OP's definition of syntax is, basically, "rules". OP's definition of semantics is "understanding", not "meaning".

So by that definition, computers really only seem to be following more and more complex rules. OP seems to be of the opinion that the "semantics" side relies on something outside of encodable rules. In that regard, a computer doesn't understand its program anymore than a car engine understands its pistons. That doesn't mean that we can't encode meaning into our programs (what computer scientists intend with the word semantics). It also doesn't mean that I think OPs definition of semantics (understanding) is fundamentally impossible for computers (see my other post in this thread), just that, as far as I've seen and understand, it hasn't happened yet.

[yc-kjh]

Yes