Re: METAGRAM -- Pt. 2 Some Observations

--- Caleb Hines <cph9fa@...> wrote:
> <okay> getting{by emails{these}, of lenth{too-much}}
> <!!!>
> ("Okay, these emails are getting too much
> length!!!")
OK, I'm taking your response off line for a while to
study it.  But just a few quickie thoughts while I'm
here:

I think your observation that I'm trying to make it
verb-centric is right on the mark.  In fact I think
what I have in the back of my head is more like a
computer programming language turned inside out to
function as a descriptive rather than an imperative
computer language.


> In fact, one problem I have with some
> of your sentences is that you don't
> seem to use it very
> consistently. Sometimes you use
> verbs "is:something", sometimes you
> use prepositions "of:something", and
> sometimes you use pronouns
> "what:something". I've even seen
> mixed versions "of-what:something".
> This is all considerably more
> inconsistent than I would like.
Actually I was not thinking of the words on the left
of the ':' as actually being words, but rather that
they are abstract and completely arbitrary tags that
are defined and enumerated where ever the "function"
is defined.  I could just have easily written
"glip:something," and "norb:something" just as long as
"glip" and "norb" were defined as to what role they
represent.


I think the biggest difference between our approaches
comes from the fact that my effort was meant to
extract the essence of a sentence, with complete
disregard for how that sentence was structured while
your apporach is to describe the sentence itself.

Since my previous post I have diverged even further in
the direction of an "object oriented" syntax, which
simplifies and clarifies a lot of the structures in my
previous post.  However it also becomes completely
function-centric and loses any resemblence whatsoever
to METAGRAM.

I like your METAGRAM idea, but I also like my
divergent mutation of it.  I'm sure they can co-exist,
but I'm not sure they are mutually inteligible. ;-)


Just to give you the general flavor of my mutant
object-oriented species, here is "John threw the big
red ball"

john.Throw( OBJECT:ball.Attribute( SIZE:big COLOR:red
) TENSE:past )

OR in indented form:

john.Throw
(
    OBJECT:ball.Attribute
    (
        SIZE:big
        COLOR:red
    )
    TENSE:past
)

The "Functions" are all verbs of one sort or another,
or assertions reagrding some property, attribute,
state, or condition of the object.

--gary

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