Definition
Plain language
A stripped-down artificial language with exact rules, where every statement means exactly one thing.
As stated in the literature
A precisely specified syntax and semantics (as in logic, protocol specifications, or proof assistants) admitting no ambiguity or pragmatic connotation, proposed here as a substrate for inter-agent guarantees that natural language cannot provide.
Also called: formal languages
Why it matters: It offers a way for systems to make commitments to each other that cannot be reinterpreted, which ordinary human language can never guarantee.
For example, a contract written in code has no room for one party reading "promptly" as an hour and the other reading it as a week.
Heard on the show
“The specific tool stack is called TLA+ and PlusCal — TLA+ is a formal language for describing concurrent systems precisely; PlusCal is a friendlier notation that compiles down to it.”Episode 034 — Catching Multi-Agent Deadlocks Before Deployment With a 40-Year-Old Tool