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000008_icon-group-sender _Fri Aug 19 09:10:09 1994.msg
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1995-02-09
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Received: by cheltenham.cs.arizona.edu; Fri, 19 Aug 1994 09:32:07 MST
Date: Fri, 19 Aug 94 09:10:09 PDT
From: kwalker@sirtur.premenos.com (Ken Walker)
Message-Id: <9408191610.AA01868@sirtur.premenos.com>
To: icon-group@cs.arizona.edu
Subject: Re: Simple synatx
X-Sun-Charset: US-ASCII
Content-Length: 949
Errors-To: icon-group-errors@cs.arizona.edu
> Date: Fri, 19 Aug 1994 17:49:25 +0300 (WET)
> From: Zvi Lamm <mslamm@pluto.mscc.huji.ac.il>
>
> I was thinking about a mechanical way to decide between to synatxes which
> one is simpler. The idea is to make the definition as precise as
> possible, and see what we can learn.
> Do you think this is at all possible? What bothers me is the differance
> between the way a computer parses and the way people do. This raises the
> question - simple synatx for whom?
>
> *Ehud Lamm*
That's a good question. If you are really interested in what constitutes a
simple syntax for people, you should not try to define it. You should define
how people react to a simple syntax. From there you can form hypotheses about
the characterists of a simple syntax, and, if you are into human factors
research, you can perform experiments to test you hypotheses. (I'm not into
human factors research so I'll stick to unsubstantiated speculation :-).
Ken