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[-] superkret@feddit.org 56 points 1 week 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.

[-] folekaule@lemmy.world 21 points 1 week ago
[-] circuitfarmer@lemmy.sdf.org 10 points 1 week ago

Maybe ironically, neither one would be appropriate as a linguistic definition.

[-] affiliate@lemmy.world 4 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago)

i wonder what the inverse of the letters in the english alphabet are. since it has a non-prime number of letters (26 to be exact), 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 3 points 1 week ago

Or, in either field (formal language theory bridges both) it can mean any string of symbols, letters, or tokens.

this post was submitted on 07 Nov 2024
459 points (98.9% liked)

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