[SCL] Fwd: Common Logic status with respect to standards

[Murray Altheim]

pat hayes wrote:
[...]
> Murray, can you suggest how best to render SCL into XML? I think what we 
> should aim at here is not so much a fully-fledged XML user syntax, so 
> much as a way to take (almost) any SCL concrete language and convey it 
> down an XML pipe, so that the original form can be extracted at the 
> other end with minimal work using XML tools as far as possible to 
> 'parse' the XML. This thinks of XML as a way to convey other syntactic 
> forms between computers, rather than as a markup language; but still it 
> seems to me to be a reasonable goal.

Any codified XML syntax is by definition a markup language, and from
your request I can't see exactly what you'd want that would be different
from what I think of as a markup language. If the document at

      http://cl.tamu.edu/docs/scl/scl-latest.html

is the latest, if all you want is (from what I can tell) what you say,
they the section "A XML DTD for SCL" already has what you want. As to
how that matches up with the abstract syntax, I have no idea. Nor
could I unless I understood SCL better, which is one of the reasons
why you can't act in some mechanized way in designing markup languages.
If you want something as simplistic as what's in the SCL document, you've
already got it. It's not the language I'd design, but it's your project.

> I have in mind something like 
> every syntactic 'piece' being the string(s) that it is in the other 
> concrete syntax but with XML markup enclosing it and indicating its SCL 
> abstract-syntactic role, rather like English marked up with XML for a 
> linguistics-101 parser. If there was a way to use the XML headers to 
> encode things like the name of the dialect and the particular SCL subset 
> it was using (and any other information that might be handy) that would 
> be great, but that is icing at the present time and with our Dec 17 
> deadline.

Adding a couple of attributes on the document element for such
metadata, or creating a metadata element is simple stuff. I'm
much more concerned about whether or not the syntax makes any
sense, and speaking with my engineering hat on (toot!toot!), I'd
have to say I don't have enough information or knowledge to be
able to provide any assessment of that. I'm not in a position to
solely remedy that either.

Murray

......................................................................
Murray Altheim                    http://kmi.open.ac.uk/people/murray/
Knowledge Media Institute
The Open University, Milton Keynes, Bucks, MK7 6AA, UK               .

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