[CL] Quantified sentences

[Cameron Ross]

Interesting outcome.  I'm nearing completion of the task that has 
motived me to dig into the CL spec, so my questions should soon stop (or 
at least my posting frequency should decrease).  I really do appreciate 
the precise and timely feedback I've been receiving.

Thanks,
Cameron.


Pat Hayes wrote:
>
> On Dec 2, 2009, at 8:56 AM, 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.
>
> Quite. Also, there was a general methodological principle in the CL 
> design, which was to always permit rather than forbid, unless there 
> was a good reason to forbid. So 'meaningless' but harmless cases, like 
> these, were deliberately NOT excluded, on principle. This keeps the 
> language simpler and removes a special-case burden in syntax checking, 
> etc.. Also, we have found a number of cases where apparently 'silly' 
> cases in fact have quite valid uses. The (and) and (or) were two, but 
> also for example we decided not to prohibit numerals and quoted 
> strings in relation/function positions, even though that seemed 
> insane. However, it turns out to be very useful, in the string case, 
> as a natural way to encode RDF datatyped literals. We did not forsee 
> this and would never had noted it if the construction had been 
> arbitrarily ruled illegal just because nobody could think of what it 
> could be used for at the time.
>
> Pat
>
>>
>>
>>> Cameron.
>>
>>
>> Randall Schulz
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