References: <199811030953.JAA04308@nag.co.uk> <98102213123551@man.ac.uk>,
            <199811030953.JAA04308@nag.co.uk>
Message-ID:  <199811031653.KAA12001@dcdrjh.fnal.gov>
Reply-To: Mailing list for the LaTeX3 project
              <LATEX-L@URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE>
Date:         Tue, 3 Nov 1998 10:53:19 -0600
From: "Randolph J. Herber" <herber@DCDRJH.FNAL.GOV>
Sender: Mailing list for the LaTeX3 project
              <LATEX-L@URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE>
To: Multiple recipients of list LATEX-L
              <LATEX-L@URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE>
Subject:      Re: Quotes and punctuation
Status: R

The following header lines retained to affect attribution:
|Date:         Tue, 3 Nov 1998 15:26:07 +0100
|Reply-To: Mailing list for the LaTeX3 project
|From: Hans Aberg <haberg@MATEMATIK.SU.SE>
|Subject:      Re: Quotes and punctuation
|To: Multiple recipients of list LATEX-L

|At 07:56 -0600 1998/11/03, Randolph J. Herber wrote:
|>I disagree with your second point---with sufficient encoding, any
|>semantic can be preserved, possibly with a time penalty (which are
|>ignored when discussing such equivalences).  That is one of the
|>points of Goedel's Incompleteness (Undecidability) Theorem.

|  Provided the semantics that one wants to describe can be expressed by
|binary numbers: For example, TeX proper cannot draw a non-straight spline
|curve no matter how you apply Turing theorems and Godel theorem, even
|though you can define structures simulating that TeX can handle that -- but
|that has no practical significance unless you figure out a way to extend
|TeX to print it. (In this example, even though the curve itself can be
|described by binary numbers, the capacity of printing it cannot.)

        1) TeX does not have to print it.
           TeX only has to generate dvi that describes it.
           Providing the necessry dvi semantics for necessary operations
           is a problem for the dvi language providers.

        2) Irrational numbers are not representable by rational numbers.
           This is well known.  But, irrational numbers can be
           approximated, to any desired accuracy, by rational numbers.
           TeX, disgarding memory issues, could generate rational numbers,
           for some dvi encoding, to any desired precision.  Therefore,
           TeX could generate the output.

        3) Goedel permits encoding with arbitary semantics.  Therefore,
           an encoding for ``non-straight splines'' and for any specific
           irrational numbers could be established.

|  Hans Aberg
|                  * Email: Hans Aberg <mailto:haberg@member.ams.org>
|                  * Home Page: <http://www.matematik.su.se/~haberg/>
|                  * AMS member listing: <http://www.ams.org/cml/>

Back to the circus at hand.

Randolph J. Herber, herber@dcdrjh.fnal.gov, +1 630 840 2966, CD/CDFTF PK-149F,
Mail Stop 318, Fermilab, Kirk & Pine Rds., PO Box 500, Batavia, IL 60510-0500,
USA.  (Speaking for myself and not for US, US DOE, FNAL nor URA.)  (Product,
trade, or service marks herein belong to their respective owners.)