Maybe ironically, neither one would be appropriate as a linguistic definition.
Comment on I thought it was an easy question ...
superkret@feddit.org 1 month ago
If you want a clear definition, ask a mathematician:
A word is any written product of group elements and their inverses.
Or a computer scientist:
A word is a fixed-sized datum handled as a unit by the instruction set or the hardware of the processor.
circuitfarmer@lemmy.sdf.org 1 month ago
affiliate@lemmy.world 1 month ago
i wonder what the inverse of the letters in the english alphabet are. since it has 26 letters, we know that some letters won’t have inverses. i wonder which letters don’t have inverses. i guess it would be pretty easy to find out if you use the standard alphabet ordering and then port the alphabet over to ℤ/26ℤ, but that’s not a particularly satisfying answer.
Malgas@beehaw.org 1 month ago
Or, in either field (formal language theory bridges both) it can mean any string of symbols, letters, or tokens.
folekaule@lemmy.world 1 month ago
Meanwhile, in Unicode land…