RE: Notes on 7/20 BLD draft

Chris,

Thanks for your notes. Michael changed a lot already and will respond
(perhaps tomorrow, because of CEST timezone). I worked on 2.1.1.3.

-- Harold


Note: The section numbers Chris is referring to are generated by
Sandro's wiki-tr, as used at http://www.w3.org/2005/rules/wg/wiki/Core.
While the "7/20 BLD" has changed meanwhile, you can always get an
up-to-date version there.


2.1.1.3


> It would be best if the correspondence between the ASN and the ebnf 
> were more obvious.  Perhaps this will be generated automatically at 
> some point, but for now the productions (nonterminals) should have the

> same names as the classes in the ASN.  I'm happy changing the names of

> the ASN classes to CONJUNCTION, etc.

The usual names And/Or are used as visible ASN class names,
as XML element names, and as EBNF prefix operator names.
For the EBNF (only) there is a need to distinguish between
a terminal name like 'And' and an invisible nonterminal name
like CONJUNCTION that generates an entire expression applying
the operator to arguments as in 'And' '(' CONDITION* ')'.


"firts-order logic" => "first-order logic"

Done. 


> * It seems to me a cleaner syntax is to remove existentials from 
> conditions and unify all quantifiers outside the rule (as with 
> universal now), and add a restriction in horn that existentially 
> quantified vars cannot appear in the conclusion.

The RIF Basic Condition Language is meant to be reusable also
(in PR and) outside the context of any rule, stand-alone (e.g.
for queries and integrity checking), where existentials cannot
be rewritten as universals in the Example 3b.->3a. manner.


> * In the "XML serialization" section the language needs to be changed 
> to indicated that the xml serialization is a serialization of the ASN 
> and NOT of the eBNF.  The eBNF is a serialization of the ASN.

Done.


> Thus 
> the rules for serializing the ebnf should be removed.

Transformation rules from ASN to EBNF had been removed
already before WD1. The EBNF Concrete Syntax is used
to explain and illustrate the main Basic Logic ideas.


> * In 'Syntax for Primitive Types" I don't like the quotes around all 
> values - are they needed?

Necessary (and familiar) for strings, convenient (and familiar) for
iris,
and used for uniformity to surround all lexical forms.


> "a priori" is generally italicized.

Done.

Received on Monday, 23 July 2007 23:34:48 UTC