At 00:43 +0300 2001/02/16, Alexander Cherepanov wrote: >> If a sentence cannot be parsed by a human, it is of little use in the >> human world I gather. > >Such a sentence _without markup_ cannot be parsed by a human, so it's >useless when it doesn't have markup; I agree. But the author adds markup to >the sentence, so it becomes useful. I'ld like to emphasize that the author >doesn't parse anything (except his thoughts; and his thoughts are already >markuped:-)) when he adds markup to his sentence. But what do you mean with the word "markup"; is that the same thing as any contextual information, or does it mean certain marks on some words or groups? -- You can easily make a sentence like The gap in the last formula should be made like in the first one and the gap should be made like in the second one. (humanly) parsable by adding a sentence Note that the second "gap" is a mathematical object, or putting it somewhere else, like a different file, which is a way to represent fonts and styles in some text editors. -- So the information must be provided somehow, by syntax context, experience, etc, but not necessarily by what is called "markup" in the sense of todays markup languages. -- The only thing that matters is how useful it is to the authors in forwarding their intent, and a more advanced grammar can help there. Hans Aberg