On Jan 22, 11:48 am, Paul Rubin <http://phr...@[EMAIL
PROTECTED]
> wrote:
>
> Set theory doesn't figure into it anywhere as far as I know.
That seems a bit extreme to me. Set theory IMHO is always worth
a good look. And certainly if the programming language being
discussed is say, SETL or SQL, then set theory is very relevant.
> Anything having to do with programming
> language theory is (as far as I can tell) entirely about the
> countable.
Funny, I was pondering this very issue earlier today.
I don't think it is strictly true. Certainly our languages,
and what they can compute, are only countably infinite,
but we ought not limit our attention to the countable,
if only to understand exactly where lies the line between
what is and is not computable. And we may also consider
that we often find ourselves writing programs that need
to approximate the behavior of real arithmetic. The domain
of our approximation may be finite but the domain being
approximated (the reals) in uncountable.
Marshall
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