 As discussed in the previous section, however, using the notion of representation in an account of computation involves some difficulties. If computation could be accounted for without appealing to representation, those difficulties would be avoided. One way to do so is to maintain that computation simply is the manipulation of language-like structures via the manipulation of their syntactic properties, leaving semantics by the wayside. The structures being manipulated are assumed to be language-like only in that they have syntactic properties—they need not have any semantics. In this syntactic account of computation, the notion of representation is not used at all.