[SCL] new draft

[pat hayes]

>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.

The SCL list is open to anyone, but please be clear that its purpose 
is limited, with a sharper focus than the CL effort, and that this 
list is intended for technical discussions which are now reaching a 
fairly late stage. You can see the origins of SCL in the early part 
of the SCL email archives. Issues of ISO compliance in particular are 
not appropriate for this forum.

>One point I hope that SCL people can address is: how does this SCL 
>(or CL?) differ from Z?

Please raise this issue on the CL list, not the SCL list.

>Isn't SCL just a subset/profile of Z?

No.

>   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

 From where comes this criterion for what a specification 'should' do? 
Absent any documentary guidance from a higher authority, it seems to 
me that the specification should be written by the people writing it.

>  detail the syntax of the language (the draft claims the metasyntax 
>is EBNF, but it is not

It is now.

>) and each of the "productions" would have a semantic description, 
>i.e., the meaning of instances of the production (combined: syntax 
>and semantics).

The semantic is gathered into one table, which is the preferred way 
to described a model theory. It is particularly important in this 
case since the syntax does not suffice in isolation to provide the 
semantics precisely.

>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.

The SCL document is not a draft ISO standard document. But I welcome 
suggestions for better presentation.

>
>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.

We plan to write and include a glossary but will leave that until the 
document is more complete and more stable.

Pat

>
>-FF
>
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