[SCL] SCL basic consensus badly needed

[Tanel Tammet]

Hi,

pat hayes wrote:

 >> SW markup conventions cannot solve this without coherent semantics
 >> presented
 >> in the Lbase style, be the target language based on SCL, CL or
 >> something else.
 >>
 >> I guess most of the people engaged with SCL, especially you yourself,
 >> see our SCL project in this light: to be a usable base language
 >> for translating other languages into.
 >>
 >> If that is the case, then usefulness for translating into
 >> is really what we are after, and the language itself,
 >> outside the translation aspects, is of little importance.
 >>
 >> Hence we should take the translation aspects most
 >> seriously, IMHO. They are the very reason for SCL.
 >> Maybe people disagree, but I am rather inclined to
 >> think that this is a common understanding or
 >> motivation for SCL.
 >
 >
 > I agree, but to serve this Lbase-style role for OTHER languages does not
 > require us to further translate SCL into a subset of itself, surely?

Hm, true. These are indeed separate aspects.

I was mixing them up somewhat carelessly in the
paragraph above.

 > If you want to translate uniformly into SFOL rather than SCL itself, I
 > agree that a uniform translation is essential and that we should
 > probably settle on the uniform holds/app version for the extendability
 > reasons you have already pointed out.

You are right, I do want to translate into SFOL, indeed,
not into a new exotic language "SCL" :-)

As we know, typical questions in such a case are "which FOL
syntax?" and "Are any symbols pre-axiomatised?"
(a subquestion: "Do we havew equality in the language")
and even "which coding style?", etc.

Hence I look at SCL not as a stand-alone language
in its own rights, so to say, but both as:

a) A macro language on top of SFOL, created for easier
    translatability into (no holds/app in SCL itself,
    hence, for example, translation RDF->SCL should be
    simpler and easier to understand than  RDF->SFOL)

b) A concretisation & "small-scale" extension of SFOL:

     1) concrete, well-described syntaxes

     2) some pre-axiomatised symbols (equality, integers,
        metainfo operators, etc)

Surely this is, more or less, a common viewpoint of both SCL
and CL.

Aspects (a), (b.1) and (b.2) seem to be well-suited
for different presentation styles, however:

  (a) seems to be a formalist issue, well-suited for
      presentation via a translation algorithm to SFOL
      (my favourite :-)

  (b.1) seems to be well-suited for semantic presentation
       (if there is no "standard" SFOL syntax, what then
        to translate into?)

  (b.2) seems to be a mixed bag: you could define symbols
        either via translation, via stand-alone semantics
        or plain axiomatisation.

Tanel Tammet