[SCL] new draft

[Frank Farance]

SCL people-

I'm new to this list.  I thought I was subscribed to the KIF list and I found out last week at the INCITS/L8 meeting that the list had (again) changed and I was no longer part of the discussion of the CL activities.

One point I hope that SCL people can address is: how does this SCL (or CL?) differ from Z?  Isn't SCL just a subset/profile of Z?  Based on the draft document, it appears to me that SCL can be specified by pointing to a portion of the Z standard and adding a few "customizations".  Perhaps I'm wrong, so could someone explain the relationship?  Maybe there is a prior E-mail where this has already been discussed, so could someone point me to that E-mail discussion?

Regarding the new draft, I'm having problems with the form of the specification of SCL.  For the formal specification of standards for languages like SCL, the specification should detail the syntax of the language (the draft claims the metasyntax is EBNF, but it is not) and each of the "productions" would have a semantic description, i.e., the meaning of instances of the production (combined: syntax and semantics).  I don't see a one-to-one mapping of "productions" to semantic descriptions, so my sense is that the semantic description is incomplete in the current draft.  I'm sure that a precise description is intended, but I am not seeing it within the current draft.

Also, could the terms be defined in the standard?  There are a good number of terms that appear to have a specific meaning (e.g., vocabulary, extension, etc.), but they don't mean what they say in the OED (the OED's definitions are not precise enough for this subject area) and the technical meanings can easily be misunderstood.

-FF

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Frank Farance, Farance Inc.    T: +1 212 486 4700   F: +1 212 759 1605
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