Hi Alan,

I've been looking at a pseudo-natural language interface for my work;
not to a general purpose computing language but as the front end to an
expert system.

Here is an example of our syntax:

> (1)	If there is a person and: 
> 	(a)	the document is a document of an agency and the document is not an exempt document; or
> 	(b)	the document is an official document of a Minister and the document is not an exempt document;
> 	then the person is legally entitled to access the document. 

The system parses this into a form that the expert system engine can understand.  Basically to do this at a simple level, you only need to be able to recognise some fairly simple grammatical features of a clause (we have a lexicon of about 30 words).

I don't know how much of this approach could be adapted to a more general scripting language.  What documentation that exists (which isn't much) is at http://aide.austlii.edu.au/aide/.

Cheers,

Russell

Alan Kay <Alan.Kay at disney.com> wrote:
> Actually, this would be a very good time for suggestions, as we are 
> close to trying a whole bunch of "scripting syntax" experiments.
> 
> Please give pointers, etc.
> 
> Cheers,
> 
> Alan
> 
> ------
> 
> At 11:08 AM -0800 11/22/00, Jamie Fenton wrote:
> >I would be interested in finding a JPython-like
> >language implemented in Squeak. I wrote a natural
> >language gloss for Digitalk Smalltalk-V in 1989 that
> >sorta did that, however I would rather use something
> >a little more traditional for a media-arts education
> >project I am doing.
> >
> >Has anyone done anything like this yet?
> >
> >-- Jamie Fenton


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Russell Allen

russell.allen at firebirdmedia.com

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