[SCL] minutes of telecon 8 April 03

[John F. Sowa]

Jim,

I think that we may agree on many of the SCL design
decisions, but perhaps not for the same reasons.
In any case, that is not a problem, since we can
all be satisfied with the results.

But just for the record, I wanted to make a few
comments on your comments:

In translating your example to SCL (or other
version of logic), I would prefer to use
binary predicates to represent "tags":

<person :John>
  <name>John</name>
  <size>large</size>
</person>

<person :Mary>
  <name>Mary</name>
  <size>Medium</size>
  <inLovewith :John />
</person>

I would say that John is a instance of type Person,
for which the monadic predicate Person(x) is true.
I would interpret those tags as binary predicates
HasName(x,y), HasSize(x,y), isInLoveWith(x,y), etc.

The original motivation for relations with an
arbitrary number of argumets was to support KIF-like
constructs like (and x y z w....).

I also quibble with the term "web language", since I
don't see any fundamental difference between languages
that process data from the WWW and languages designed
for more traditional kinds of programming -- other
than the excruciatingly ugly syntax, which has to be
sweetened with a lot of sugar to make the so-called
web languages look like traditional languages.

 > If SCL intended for the web, this is a sure fire loss.  Perhaps
 > instead of BNF we could use XML (DTD or schema) and then
 > we'd get something similar -- wouldn't be quite as general,
 > but would make it easier to build.

For practical implementations, people can specify
the categories in any notation they like, including
DTDs.

John