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Abstract

We want unambiguous communication with future generations with whom dialog is impossible, without restricting what today’s authors can communicate. For this, we need language that we can confidently expect our descendants to understand easily. This challenge is the kind of language problem that has been central to computer science since it emerged as a discipline in the 1960s. Its core can be restated as, “ensure that an arbitrary computer program will execute correctly on a machine whose architecture is unknown when the program is saved.”

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© 2007 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg

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(2007). Durable Representation. In: Preserving Digital Information. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-540-37887-7_12

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-540-37887-7_12

  • Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-540-37886-0

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-540-37887-7

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