[SCL] Abstract Syntax, ISO 8824/8825

[John F. Sowa]

Tanel,

No.   As I said, the ASN group took the terminology, but
they omitted the methodology.

TT> This confirmed my suspicions that ALL the syntaxes we have
> considered so far for SCL are hugely abstract.

It is more correct to say that all the syntaxes we have to
support by means of the CL semantics are "hugely concrete".

The CL semantics itself, however, is being defined in terms
of an abstract mathematical structure, which has no concrete
(i.e., writable or printable) form.  That structure is what
is called "abstract syntax" in the McCarthy-VDL-VDM tradition.
The various notations we must define by means of the CL
methodology are the concrete syntaxes.

See the report:

   http://www.cs.ncl.ac.uk/research/pubs/articles/papers/470.pdf

And the references cited there.

John