[Scl] Re: Report on Common Logic

[pat hayes]

John, thanks for all the work, but I really don't think that much of 
the material you have put into this draft has anything particularly 
to do with SCL and will only serve to distract a reader who is trying 
to understand what the project is about.  Im thinking particularly of 
the Frege/Pierce historical intro material in section 1, (from 'All 
modern systems...' all the way through to 'additional semantic 
features' which could be usefully contracted to a single paragraph; 
and BTW the sentence "Many languages also implement extensions to FOL 
for modal logics, metalanguages, and quantifiers that range over 
predicates; those extensions can also be handled with a small number 
of additional semantic features. " is very misleading in this context 
and should be removed before this is distributed publicly) and the 
entire section 3, which seems to be entirely beside the point and 
irrelevant (in this SCL context, though highly entertaining and 
insightful in itself, I hasten to add).

I would also suggest that your way of describing SCL as a family of 
related concrete syntaxes each with its own name is misleading and 
rather misses the central point: I would prefer us to stick to the 
single-abstract/ multiple-concrete terminology whereby SCL *is* the 
abstraction and we refer to the concrete syntactic forms as SCL 
languageS (note the plural), rather than by separate names. (or if 
you prefer, use a terminology such as 'SCL-conformant') Also, please 
put an emphasis on the 'new' aspects of SCL, in particular the 
syntactic freedom it offers. Also, the potential connection with the 
semantic web is not a private bee in my bonnet, but is also a central 
concern for Tanel Tammet and Chris, as well as several other members 
of the group; so I would like to see it given slightly more 
prominence.

BTW, the general idea of abstract syntax has been around for a while 
and was invented by John McCarthy, who should be given explicit 
credit. cf.
http://www.informatik.uni-trier.de/~ley/db/conf/vldb/Smith78b.html
http://www-formal.stanford.edu/jmc/towards/node12.html

Pat

PS, I also, on another note, DEPLORE the practice of writing 
documents which can only be viewed using a small number of browsers. 
You are not the guilty party here, I know, but our rule should be 
that if it cannot be viewed using every browser on the planet, then 
the fault is ours. The W3C applies this stringent a criterion and 
manages to produce some elegant documents nevertheless. If we make it 
inconvenient for about 90% of the planet to even be able to read our 
documents than we will be treated as the ineffectual wankers that we 
will in fact be. On the same note, please do not inject snide little 
anti-Microsoft comments into anything put out as an SCL document. It 
makes us geeks chuckle, but it makes almost everyone else want to 
vomit, and there are a lot more of them than there are of us.


>Harry,
>
>I have updated and corrected the report on Common Logic.
>Following is the latest version:
>
>    http://www.jfsowa.com/logic/clrep.htm
>    Report on the Common Logic Project
>
>I don't plan to make any further revisions today,
>so feel free to print it whenever you get a chance.
>
>But please make sure that your browser supports the
>math & logic symbols.  If it doesn't, you can download
>Firebird (URL on the first page of the report), which
>is the most compact of the modern browsers.
>
>I plan to add more material to the report over the
>next two days.  So you can tell the gang in Melbourne
>that they should download their own copy of the
>hottest poop.
>
>And by the way, please let me know of any comments,
>suggestions, or complaints about the report.
>
>John


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