Authoritative Definition of "Descriptive Language"

[Steve Traugott]

Hi All!

I have a silly (slightly embarrassing) question, for an upcoming LISA
paper -- does anyone know of any authoritative (computer science)
definition of the term "Descriptive Language"?  

Mark, you usually seem to equate "descriptive" with "declarative".
For example:

        http://www.iu.hio.no/~mark/research/immune/AIdrift/AIdrift.html
        http://www.cfengine.org/docs/cfengine-1.6.3.Reference.html
        http://www.geocrawler.com/archives/3/374/2001/3/0/5358475/

I've found others who do the same.  For example:

        http://crl.nmsu.edu/expedition/publications/boas-acl99.pdf

These terms seem to be freely interchangeable in CS usage, but I
haven't yet found any explicit text saying so -- is the current usage
still that fuzzy?  Does anyone see any problem with me explicitly
equating them in a refereed paper?  Feel free to forward this to your
favorite linguistics list...  ;-)

Thanks,

Steve
-- 
Stephen G. Traugott 
UNIX/Linux Infrastructure Architect, TerraLuna LLC
stevegt@TerraLuna.Org   
http://www.stevegt.com