Complying with the rules does not guarantee meaning: linguistics and programming.

Interesting reference to Noam Chomsky, unfortunately better known for his political ideas than his work in linguistics:

Plans, rules, order —I should have known better. The relief I looked forward to at my desk, my perfect test —I should have realized even before I logged on to the system that morning that something else was going to happen. A linguist knows that following the rules is no assurance of anything. "Colorless green ideas sleep furiously," the linguist Noam Chomsky once famously said, his perfectly well-formed sentence: grammatically correct, signifying nothing.

(Ullman: pp. 11-12)

The study of linguistics does have a direct link to that of programming languages —not to talk about the field of artificial intelligence. Basically, a language is nothing but a system where patterns, structures, syntax, grammar, rules... are all very closely related. How is this any different from a computer or a computer network? More and more we realize that different fields that up until know where considered to be separate are actually far more closely related than we ever thought. I have a feeling this trend will do nothing but to deepen in the near future.