communication and representation

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Message-id: <9009071721.AA02990@owl.parc.xerox.com>
Date: Fri, 7 Sep 90 10:21:08 PDT
From: <hayes@parc.xerox.com>
Reply-To: hayes@parc.xerox.com
To: mrg@sunburn.stanford.edu
Cc: interlingua@vaxa.isi.edu
In-reply-to: Michael Genesereth's message of Fri, 7 Sep 1990 10:00:45 PDT <CMM.0.88.652726845.mrg@Sunburn.Stanford.EDU>
Subject: communication and representation 

I dont know what it was that made me think that Mike G. ( he's a friend of
mine, by the way, so please moderate your language in future ) regarded the
interlingua as an rcode.  I think it was because he insisted on its having
a coherent representational semantics, and talked of translating into and
out of it, and his proposals for how it should be structured made it seem
very much like a powerful representation language.  

I should perhaps explain that I dont think this is at all a bad idea, in
fact it may be the only to do it: that is, the only good ccode ( in this
context ) may be an rcode.  The point of my message was just to emphasise
that there is another way to think about it which leads to rather different
intuitions about what it, and the ways it is used to communicate, would be
like: more like a natural language than a logic, roughly.  And that I think
some of the folk on your committee are thinking this way, and so
misunderstandings loom dangerously close.

But seriously, if this whole way of talking isn't helpful, just forget it:
it wasnt meant to be a critique, only some useful remarks.

Pat