 It’s not all bad news. It is sometimes forgotten that Gold established a number of optimistic results as well as the pessimistic one about learning from text. Given what he called an ‘informant’ environment rather than a text environment, we see strikingly different results. An informant environment is an infinite sequence of presentations sorted into two lists, positive instances (expressions belonging to the target language) and negative instances (not in the language). Almost all major language-theoretic classes are identifiable in the limit from an informant environment (up to and including the class of all languages with a primitive recursive characteristic function, which comes close to covering any language that could conceivably be of linguistic interest), and all computably enumerable languages become learnable if texts are allowed to be sequenced in particular ways (see the results in Gold 1967 on ‘anomalous text’).