Help?

[venta]

Just had an email from a friend who teaches computer science at A-level, and is baffled by an exam question his students asked him about.

Can anyone offer definitions of the following:

syntactic representation of knowledge
semantic representation of knowledge
direct manipulation interface

Some quick googling offered little help on the first two, and suggested that the last one is a Can Of Worms (TM). I've found a couple of pages waffling vaguely about direct manipulation, once of which describes it as "complex, compound, important and often poorly defined construct". Which is nice.

Comments

Bunch of @rse !

[bateleur.livejournal.com]

That's the sad thing about formal computer science courses. To pass them, you're supposed to memorise all this utter shit that has nothing to do with computing.

Chances are the first two are really just about explaining the difference between 'syntax' and 'semantics'.

Re: Bunch of @rse !

[venta.livejournal.com]

I agree :)

Of course, the fact that some monkey has employed me as a programmer for over 3 years now, yet I can't define syntactic and semantic for you proves your point....

I spent a year in the Comlab drawing up pretty schemas in Z, proving programmes correct and writing in Prolog. Guess how much I've used of that since I got a job :)