Re: METAGRAM -- Pt. 2 (and triggers too)

--- Caleb Hines <cph9fa@...> wrote:
> > --- Caleb Hines <cph9fa@A...> wrote:
<snip>

> > Personally, it seems more logical or natural to
> write
> >
> > needing_of{milk} rather than needing{of milk}
> where
> > "needing_of" is taken to be a single word.
> >
> > I'm not sure I can justify that impression except
> to
> > say that it's closer to the way I did it in my own
> > similar project a while back.
>
> Thanks for the suggestion! I could maybe see the
> sense of doing it that way
> if milk were always the only argument of the verb
> (as it was in this
> instance). But what if I had several arguments for
> the verb? I want to be
> able to put all the arguments into one predicate
> list.
>
> Compare:
> needing{of milk, for breakfast, tommorow}
> ?*needing-of{milk}, needing-for{breakfast},
> needing{tommorow}
> ?*needing-of{milk, for breakfast, tommorow}
>
Ah ha! Your way does make more sense.  Perhaps that is
one of the reasons why my attempt withered on the
vine.

To generalize even more, what about this:

needing{ OF.milk, BY.John, FOR.breakfast,
TIME.tommorow, PLACE.home }

Where "OF", "BY", "FOR", "TIME", and "PLACE" are not
actually "words", but declarations of argument
"types".

Each verb is defined as expecting a certain number of
arguments of a certain type, and certain defaults are
prescribed for arguments that are not explicity
present when the verb is mentioned.  Thus if the TIME
argument is omitted then it is assumed to be
"TIME.now", and so forth.