RE: Glossary entry: Abstract syntax

> A syntax must account for how statements in a language 
> are going to be specified, and need not account for things 
> that are implied (ie not explicit) in the syntax.  

Sure, that's what you can do using MOF/UML metanodels.
 
> A meta-model as a model of a modeling language must account for all 
> the things in a language that matter to tools, and need not account 
> for everything in the syntax.

That's not true, I can't follow you. If you make a metamodel 
to define a language, then you account for everything in the 
(abstract/conceptual) syntax.
 
> In syntax, you must be concerned with 
> how a sort is defined.  In a metamodel, you don't need to represent 
> that (you CAN, of course), but you must represent that a language 
> element has a sort.

No, you need not represent that for constructs for which the
syntax does not require it. In a rule metamodel a function
need not have a sort. It will have a sort, though, in the 
underlying vocabulary metamodel (which you still miss to 
discuss, btw).
 
> The problem with using a metamodel as an abstract syntax is that you 
> must identify the parts of the model that don't actually have a 
> syntactic construct. 

Again, I can't follow you.

> So the UML diagrams you see for RIF are to be interpreted as visual 
> representations of the syntax, such that a subclass is a syntactic 
> disjunction an aggregation is syntactic concatenation, and 
> multiplicity on aggregation is repetition.  The tools that will 
> generate the XML and BNF syntax specifications for RIF from the asn06 
> will use that assumption.

So, was there any decision to use Sandro's experimental "asn06"?
What about the objections of Francois, and my suggestion to use 
the more mature framework of KM3/ATL? Are they just ignored?

-Gerd

Received on Thursday, 8 March 2007 21:38:45 UTC