&gt; If you are interested in defining &quot;low cognitive load&quot; that&#x27;s a poor choice, in my opinion.<p>I&#x27;m interested in “low cognitive load without sacrificing technical precision.” It&#x27;s a much harder goal to achieve than “low cognitive load if we hand-wave the tricky details.”<p>&gt; However this has little to do with cognitive load, even if such formal semantics existed it doesn&#x27;t necessarily mean it would be easy for a human mind.<p>Which is exactly my point. I only consider a language simple if its formal description is simple.<p>&gt; If you agree that formal semantics is just a translation from one formalism to another, you can&#x27;t claim that a formalism A is semantically more complex than formalism B without picking a formalism C as a reference point.<p>No disagreement here. I even stated my personal choice of C.