[SCL] new draft

[John F. Sowa]

Pat,

Frank's suggestion is good.  That is indeed a common way
of associating semantics with syntax in compilers and other
language processors:

FF> 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.

PH> 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.

The table could be cross referenced to the syntactic production
rules.  But the relationships won't be exactly one-to-one for
all CL-conformant languages, since some languages will require
purely syntactic rearrangements (sometimes called "syntactic
sugar"), which do not directly affect the semantics.  The
so-called semantics of those rules would simply move things
around or add "eye-candy" to the notation.

And by the way, I am very happy with the following decision:

PH> The only issue is how to define the scope of a name when
 > naming a...er...thingie, for subsequent importing. So I suggest
 > we adopt 'text' for a sequence or set of sentences, and 'module'
 > for a piece of text with a name and (optionally) a header, and
 > I will learn to avoid saying 'ontology' in an SCL context.

John