Trees of Forests

Trees of trees. Worlds of worlds. Infinite flatland, into which our little minds dig little holes, and discover that nothing is truly flat, and that mostly things consist of the holes.

Reaching into the holes are long tunnels, each of which branches into many more tunnels, and each of those has tunnels, until the branches are lost to our senses.

Silly, perhaps, but this is the fate of all analysis. One looks at a hair, to discover that it has little hairs of its own, and each part has more parts until we reach a level where only conjecture has tread. Languages for computers also develop such branches and divergences.

Almost all of the attempts to create sensible and simple procedural statements which have no shades of gray, only things which are either true or not true. If one wants to test the value of gray things, then the statement still demands that the gray be some value that is both greater than 0 and less than perhaps 255. Yet a human may not be able to directly measure the grayness of something of such little difference, unless the gray values are large but adjacent regions, where the eye creates a visible boundary between their otherwise ambiguous gray values.

The simple languages turn out to grow very large complexities despite themselves. But computer languages do not generally write themselves. Humans, over many centuries and generations, have taught themselves language, each particular one starting out rather simple, but accretion after accretion of "ifs ands and buts" eventually makes the language so complicated that few people can ever learn it completely.

English has over 500,000 "normal" words, and far more than that counting all the specialized jargon of various disciplines. There are millions of animals, plants and other organisms that we have named. We say they are Latin or Greek based, as in Lepidapteraor Telescopic as well as completely artificial words like P54 or Pentium.

In addition to those kinds of words there are others that only mean something to a system, such as account numbers, license plate numbers, part numbers, device identifiers, chemical names. These are infinite words, which have no enumeration in a dictionary, but are integral to some database method or filing system in a business or government.

But imagine that for every group of 100 words that I create a title for it. From then on, whenever I want to convey that set of 100 words, I merely invoke its title. In a similar way, each group of program instructions to a computer will be give some little title. DIR means "directory display" to a certain class of computer. We don't tell the computer some tedious string of binary numbers, which each program consists of, in sometimes utterly complicated and difficult forms. It is much more sane to assign a symbol to each range of identical program strings, just as having a title for a book.

But each group of programs that comprises a system will have a name as well, as in XP or Linux, and this group of electronic components that interconnect processing units with memory subsystems, graphical displays and I/O devices is called either a Desktop or a Laptop, sometimes with only a slight difference, usually in weight and size.

The alphabet that this computer uses has a name called Ascii, and more generally there can be Unicode which contains a root core of Ascii. Symbols with yet more groupings are symbolized yet again and become members of other groups.

If mankind exists for another thousand years, how much of this complexity will have grown? Or will it all just be forgotten, like the fish passing each nameless other fish in the ocean, or each indistinguishable atom in every indistinguishable molecule of intergalactic gas.