[SCL] REQUEST FOR FEDBACK: core syntax

[pat hayes]

Guys, I'd appreciate feedback (on something more important than 
terminology :-).

After thrashing around for a while, I think that the best choice for 
the 'core' syntax is a KIF-style syntax, but tweaked a little to make 
it easier to read.  Chief changes are these:

1.  No explicit syntactic marking of variables: a variable is just a 
name which is bound by a quantifier. This makes the examples a lot 
less ugly to read for many people and gets rid of the need to handle 
free vars as a special case in the MT.

2.  No explicit marking for forall and &: a conjunction is just a 
list of sentences and the unmarked quantifier case is the forall.  So 
for example this KIF

(forall (?x ?y)(implies (and (P ?x)(P ?y)) (P ?x ?y) ))

would look like this:

(x y)(implies ((P x)(P y)) (P x y) ))

3. Use of parentheses and first-name-after-'(' as a universal 
grouping device, so that for example the header syntax will be

(scl:ontology (scl:header <sentence>*) <sentence>+)

rather than the ad-hoc double-colon thingie I invented.

QUESTION: Any strong objections to this change?

Note, I still plan to define a 'strict' KIF dialect which will accept 
real KIF 3.0 syntax.

BTW, I am (we are) under severe pressure from other groups who want 
to use SCL, to get a core syntax finished and locked down ASAP, even 
before the rest of the document is finished, so we need to move on 
this.

So, strong feelings, please.

Pat
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