- From: Pat Hayes <phayes@ihmc.us>
- Date: Wed, 29 Nov 2006 17:42:50 -0600
- To: "John McClure" <jmcclure@hypergrove.com>
- Cc: "Kaarel Kaljurand" <kaljurand@gmail.com>, "Dan Connolly" <connolly@w3.org>, "Anne Cregan" <annec@cse.unsw.edu.au>, <public-owl-dev@w3.org>
> >>FOAF, >>>constantly made an exemplar by W3, is a bit of a mess in this regard IMHO. >> >>IMO, any attempt to avoid 'mess' in your sense will be doomed to >>failure, and is best not even attempted. It has been tried before, >>and it has always failed. And in any case there is absolutely no need >>to even attempt it. Nothing turns on the noun/verb distinction. >> >This is pretty harsh. Sorry. Imagine it said in a weary, resigned tone of voice, muffled under a damp towel. >Can you please cite where this has "been tried before"? Several programming languages were based on the idea that making them English-like would make it easier for non-geeks to write programs. COBOL was the first, almost 40 years ago now. The general consensus is that writing the code is about equally hard and requires training in any case, but the longwindedness makes these languages a pain to actually use. There have been several proposals for English-like syntaxes for logic, see for example John Sowa's 'structured English'. Again, one can make these look quite convincing by a deft choice of basic vocabulary, but they always become incomprehensible when one uses a slightly divergent one. The problem is that when it reads *almost* like English, any non-English constructions - nouns in place of verbs, the wrong preposition, etc., - become very intrusive and awkward. Some object-oriented programing notations claim similar transparency, and there have been proposals for English-y syntaxes for KRep notations, such as various frame-based systems which allow things like (Every Person who owns a donkey beats the donkey of self). I confess to not having citations ready for this, but such systems were developed at U. Texas, for example. Pat >Thanks, >John -- --------------------------------------------------------------------- IHMC (850)434 8903 or (650)494 3973 home 40 South Alcaniz St. (850)202 4416 office Pensacola (850)202 4440 fax FL 32502 (850)291 0667 cell phayesAT-SIGNihmc.us http://www.ihmc.us/users/phayes
Received on Wednesday, 29 November 2006 23:43:05 UTC