[SCL] Suggestion for SCL extension module

[John F. Sowa]

Murray,

OK.  I'll give you the executive summary.

MA> Could you distill that paper down to a paragraph summary?
> Actually, a short description of what that would mean
> syntactically? It's a bit beyond my ability right now
> to try to digest.

All the interesting ideas are in the semantics, which implies
that modal operators, such as possibility, necessity, obligation, permission,
etc., can be represented as shorthand
notation for metalevel conditions.  Since we have intended to
address metalevel issues at some time in 2004, it should be
possible to support the features necessary to handle modal
logics (and I believe nonmonotonic features, such as negation
as failure) with little or no extra syntactic or semantic work.

Syntactically, there is very little impact on how one would
represent the CL abstract syntax in XML.

In any case, this is not a critical issue that has to be
resolved before December 12th.

John