Clint,
Sorry, I should have been clearer. Sudarshan himself refers to one of the
sub-components (unevaluated expressions if I recall) as a kludge.
David
________________________________
From: Clinton Jeffery <[email protected]>
To: David Gamey <[email protected]>
Cc: [email protected]; [email protected]
Sent: Sun, August 8, 2010 6:28:57 PM
Subject: Re: [Unicon-group] SNOBOL operators - a few questions
On Sun, Aug 8, 2010 at 1:09 PM, David Gamey <[email protected]> wrote:
Beyond the acknowledgment that part of the code is a kludge and the desire to
better integrate with the rest of the language. Has the problem/challenge
been
defined in a bit more detail?
>
I don't actually acknowledge or accept the notion that Sudarshan's thesis work
is a kludge. But it was subject to the same criticism that patterns in Snobol4
received: it was a separate sublanguage residing within a host language,
something which Icon "fixed" via string scanning. In any case, we have an
Snobol4-like pattern type, where the patterns are data values, are composable
to
form larger patterns, and can evaluate certain expressions at certain points
(mainly, assigning variables to hold substring pieces that were matched) during
a pattern match. It is at present independent of the string scanning control
structure which was invented to expose and generalize certain internal
mechanisms of pattern matching, namely generators and goal-directed evaluation.
What we want is a integration of these two mechanisms. Patterns should be
usable
in the middle of string scanning, rather than be a separate mechanism. For
reference, Sudarshan's thesis is at
http://www.cs.nmsu.edu/~sgaikaiw/Thesis.pdf.
Some interesting comments by Steve Wampler, with responses from me, are at
http://www2.cs.uidaho.edu/~jeffery/unicon/pattern-sbw.html. That conversation
is
now somewhat dated, but still may provide some useful context for the
conversation.
Clint
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