KIF: What's our goal?

[pat hayes]

>John,
>  I agree.  Glad we could clear this up.  Sorts and quoting are 
>linked.  I'm advocating sorts and quoting by parameter types (like 
>Cyc) rather than a syntactic marker.

What are you guys talking about? I see no link between sorting and 
quotation (other than one can of course quote sort expressions if 
they are in the language), and I have no idea what 'quoting by 
parameter types' means.

Adam, can you give us an outline of what you have in mind here, maybe 
in the form of some illustrative examples?

Pat


>
>Adam
>
>At 01:42 PM 7/6/2001 -0400, John F. Sowa wrote:
>>Adam,
>>
>>OK.  Your requests for "minimalism" misled me.  But if you're
>>asking for a language roughly comparable in scope to CycL, then
>>I don't think that we're far apart.
>>
>> > I don't see that
>> > Cyc is richer than what I'm looking for, and I too would like a rigorous
>> > definition of the language.  In terms of specific features, Cyc is sorted
>> > (although not syntactically), has contexts, allows quantification over any
>> > term in the ontology (individuals, classes, relations, functions and
>> > contexts) and doesn't have a syntactic quoting operator.
>>
>>The issue about a quoting operator depends some of the other features.
>>If you have strict enforcement of sorts, you can avoid quotes because
>>the sort would determine whether an expression or its value is expected.
>>(Even then, you might have an ambiguity with an expression whose value
>>is an expression.)
>>
>>But if you have optional sorts, then you need some marker, such as
>>"quote" to delay evaluation or "eval" to force evaluation.
>>
>>John
>
>Adam Pease
>Teknowledge
>(650) 424-0500 x571

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