Brief Communication Linguistic Laws and Computer Programs

Is it really a “law” of languages encompassing everything from human to monkey to DNA? Or is it just an empirical curiosity, of no more system-theoretic significance than, say, a spurious correlation?. But the empirical evidence is mounting that when we finally manage to create a theoretical structure within which to speak mathematically about complex systems, power laws like Zipf’s will appear as a necessary consequence of such theories. When (and if) they do will be the moment when they pass from interesting empirical curiosities to laws of nature. -John L. Casti