Re: Implications for KIF

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Date: Fri, 14 May 93 08:03:07 EDT
From: sowa <sowa@turing.pacss.binghamton.edu>
Message-id: <9305141203.AA03064@turing.pacss.binghamton.edu>
To: cg@cs.umn.edu, neches@ISI.EDU, sowa@turing.pacss.binghamton.edu
Subject: Re: Implications for KIF
Cc: interlingua@ISI.EDU

Bob,

I think that your suggestion to call for a summary helped us
reach a useful resolution of the debate.  The use of ?x is clearly
the simplest, both for people and machines. 

The only people who might object are the ones who have to implement
KIF in LISP -- they will have to write a separate parser for KIF
instead of taking advantage of the built-in Common LISP reader.
But if we are successful in making KIF and CGs into an ANSI and ISO
standard, there will be many implementations in all sorts of languages
other than LISP.  Although LISP may have been the inspiration for the
KIF syntax, KIF is more likely to be implemented in C for the X3T2
communications people.

By the way, I want to emphasize the point that the commas would cause
more trouble in the long run than the (name ...) construction, which
could be hidden by another one-character macro.  But the commas make
KIF a non-context-free language, for which you have to worry about
counting levels of nesting in order to be sure how many commas to add.
Keeping KIF context-free would help everyone who has to translate
to or from it.  

John