[developers] TDL Syntax Extensions

[Stephan Oepen]

dear all,

in a former life, we had a BSCW workspace for PET, where emily
once posted a very relevant message.  i am about to shut down
the PET workspace, hence forward emily's message below (and
will do the same for a few more messages).

all best, oe

======= 17-aug-04 posting by emily =======

Hello,

The past few months have seen a two minor extensions
to tdl as accepted by the LKB:

-- Documentation strings, enclosed in " ", in
the first line after the parents. (Types only)

-- Type addenda statements, signalled by :+ (instead
of :=) which allow users to (monotonically) add
information to previously defined types: additional
parents, additional constraints, and/or additional
documentation strings.

In BNF, the revisions look like this:

Avm-def -> := Conjunction | Comment Conjunction
Comment -> " string "

Type-addendum -> Type Avm-addendum .
Avm-addendum -> :+ Parents Conjunction | Parents Comment

                   Conjunction | Parents | Parents Comment |
                   Comment Conjunction | Comment |
                   Conjunction

The motivation for the type addendum is from
the Grammar Matrix. I hope to soon define modules
for, say, basic word order, in which I'll be defining
types that I expect grammar writers to want to add
to. Defining a subtype to bear the additional
constraints is not always an option, and overwriting
the existing Matrix type with a new type containing
the original info plus the new constraints is
a) hacky and b) bad news for distributing Matrix
updates.

The documentation strings should eventually be
browseable within the LKB, and we intend (someday :-)
to document the Matrix in this way.

The purpose of this note is to request that these
extensions be considered for inclusion in PET (flop)
as well.

Thanks,
Emily
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