1.8 What Do We Mean by “Meaning”?
In this chapter and also the rest of the book, we have used and shall use phrases like: “the machine understands a particular language” or “the semantic analysis phase of a compiler finds out the meaning of statements of the input code”. It should be clearly understood that this anthropological (humanlike) characterization of what a machine is actually doing is for convenience only. The machine does not “understand” the “meaning” of what you, as a programmer, have specified. Perhaps this humanization of the machine behaviour comes from fond attachment to one of our most complex creations – a modern computing machine.
Suppose that you have visited Japan, but do not know Japanese language. Having enough money, ...
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