Re: Mad idea: Programming language based on RDF

On 11/8/2017 9:50 PM, Victor Porton wrote:
> Just a few seconds ago I had a mad idea:
>
> Make a programming language based on RDF rather than on plain text.
>
> Well, this would require many (...) lists to specify the order of
> execution.
>
> What do you think?

I think that actual rdf has a lot of machinery and boilerplate that 
probably don't relate well to a programming language.  But if you take 
the term "rdf" to be a kind of idealized set of triples, then presumably 
you would get to an "Abstract Syntax Graph" at some point.  But any 
language that uses an abstract syntax tree could be said to fit, since a 
tree is a subset of a graph.  The only thing is that the nodes probably 
need to contain information that real rdf nodes don't contain, but you 
could get around that by adding annotation nodes to the tree.

So in a (very) generalized or idealized way, you could say that most 
current languages already use rdf.

Then the question is, what benefits could you get by going from a tree 
to a graph.  We already know many disadvantages - difficult user 
interfaces, the need to deal with cycles, harder for humans to 
comprehend, potentially lengthy processing because graphs tend to have 
many more interconnections than trees, sequencing issues because of 
cycles.  What would be the benefits?

Maybe it would be more interesting to consider how programming could be 
changed by adding some second order logic features.  Note that Sowa's 
conceptual graphs do contain second order logic features... presumably 
that could be used as a model.  Or better, use CGs as the programming basis.

TomP

Received on Thursday, 9 November 2017 15:01:36 UTC