You raise an interesting point. Data, as we use it today, is often bare-bones and without meta-data. How you interpret it is very much up to you. It's as if,

You raise an interesting point. Data, as we use it today, is often bare-bones and without meta-data. How you interpret it is very much up to you. It's as if, in English, we said "... apple ... tree" and then leave it to the user to decide if that's "I'm planting an apple tree" or "You can't get an apple from a walnut tree." You're definitely describing how we work in today's terms -- there's nothing wrong with that, I'm just challenging it. I'm saying that we can describe the protocol better using data; or more I'm saying that it is data and that any other way of describing it is sub-optimal and for that reason will eventually desist. > Doing away with languages means we need to define and agree on a non-ambiguous way of reading data Actually I'm saying that language is more ambiguous than data -- at all times and in all cases. Anything you can get language to do, you can get data to do better (in this context). But it's not a hard case to prove because actually we're using language as data. We're doing the equivalent in programming languages of typing in "three hundred" into a text file and having it read from the text file and converted to a single data unit of 300.0 when we could just be operating directly with the data. But I didn't clarify how this would happen, so I can see that it would seem a bit abstruse. I need to better communicate and clarify that we need to expand how we're viewing data and how we work with data -- that we need to incorporate more meta-data as an ancillary part of the data that both comes with it and yet is still secondary.