this post was submitted on 07 Nov 2024
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Science Memes

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[–] superkret 54 points 2 weeks ago (4 children)

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 2 weeks ago
[–] circuitfarmer@lemmy.sdf.org 10 points 2 weeks ago

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

[–] affiliate@lemmy.world 4 points 2 weeks ago* (last edited 2 weeks 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 2 weeks ago

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