🚀 go-pugleaf

Thank you!
8 or 9 people gave me clues to the source for the notes I took 20 years ago
on measuring the distance between two languages. After some
detective work in a library or three I have believe that it was
a paper by Chomsky and Schutzenberger (pp 118-161) in Braffort and
Hirschberg, 1963.

Braffort and Hirschberg(Ed): "Computer Programming and Formal Systems",
 North Holland 1963.

The clues also lead me to books with more recent applications of
topology to computing and so helped answer my other two questions:

(1) There is a connection between Dana Scott's way of defining semantics
    and the metric space of formal power series.

(2) There is a well known metric defined on the set of all languages,
    (and it is equivalent to the one I had worked out for myself).

The moral of this story is that graduate students can always
"use the source" [O Kenobi, personal communication]

A bibliography and notes will follow.

Dr. Richard J. Botting,
Department computer science,
California State University, San Bernardino.
paaaaar@calstate.bitnet
PAAAAAR%CALSTATE.BITNET@CUNYVM.CUNY.EDU
dick@silicon.sb.csu.REAL_SOON_NOW!