sheet music isn't a language, it's a notation. it's just a concise way to represent a waveform (a song). and it's certainly one dimensional because you either play the song forwards or backwards.
of course not a language in the same way English or Spanish are languages, but certainly a language in the same way mathematical formula, Lisp, or Java are languages.
>certainly one dimensional
The X axis represent time and the Y axis represent pitch. Moreover, you can have multiple pitches at the same time. I'm not a musician nor a geometrician but it does seems 2D to me, in a way regular text is not.
> of course not a language in the same way English or Spanish are languages, but certainly a language in the same way mathematical formula, Lisp, or Java are languages.
It is mostly certainly not - the defining feature of all languages (human, formal, mathematical, programming) is that you can define new words/concepts/primitives. Sheet music is notation.
Then regex, HTML, YAML, and so on are not languages either according to your definition.
Yet they are languages according to formal language theory, a definition which I’d say is a bit more widespread than yours. Indeed what you propose roughly maps to (a subset of) context-sensitive languages in particular.
Defining new primitived isn’t really essential. What matters is what you can express with the existing primitives and grammar rules. And sheet music has been quite successful at expressing incredibly complex musical concepts just fine.
(Also there’s the fact that sheet music can contain arbitrarily complex instructions to the performer in natural language, and define new notations too. But composers usually refrain from doing that for the same reason that people don’t go around inventing new idiosynchratic words in English unless they’re SF authors.)
> Yet they are languages according to formal language theory, a definition which I’d say is a bit more widespread than yours. Indeed what you propose roughly maps to (a subset of) context-sensitive languages in particular.
I love when people talk down to me as if I don't have a PhD in this shit lol. No actually what I'm talking about is Recursive languages.
> Then regex, HTML, YAML, and so on are not languages either according to your definition.
Do you see the M before the L there in both HTML and YAML? Do you know what it stands for? Markup. Markup is a funny word that colloquially means the same thing as annotate which bears a strong relationship to the word notation hmmmmmmmm.
Let me put it simply: if the force of the original comment is that context free languages can be 2d then I would say..... no duh.
written language isn't a language, it's a notation. it's just a concise way to represent a waveform (a spoken sentence). and it's certainly one dimensional because you either read forwards or backwards
sheet music isn't a language, it's a notation. it's just a concise way to represent a waveform (a song). and it's certainly one dimensional because you either play the song forwards or backwards.