[CL] Quantified sentences

[Randall R Schulz]

On Wednesday December 2 2009, Randall R Schulz wrote:
> On Wednesday December 2 2009, Cameron Ross wrote:
> > Yes, according to the CLIF grammar it is allowed, but does it make
> > sense for this to be allowed?
>
> It's pointless, but that doesn't mean a special case should be made
> of it. Another legal but pointless use of a quantifier is to bind a
> name and then make no reference to it in the matrix.
>
> As far as why not disallow these things, consider the situation in
> which you're generating CLIF programmatically rather than writing it
> by hand, forbidding an empty binding list is just another special
> case to accommodate in your code generator.


I should point out that in my CLIF parser, I emit a warning diagnostic 
when a quantifier binds an name not referred to in the matrix. I do 
that because, at least for now, I'm dealing mostly with hand-written 
CLIF and this is typically a spelling error.

It never occurred to me to diagnose an empty binding list...


Randall Schulz