[sc34wg3] CTM: Realistic use cases or toy examples?

[Robert Barta]

On Wed, Jan 30, 2008 at 02:12:41PM +0100, Steve Pepper wrote:
> Perhaps you misunderstood.
> 
> My point is that the semi-colons are indeed "unnecessary" *for
> parsers* (and parser writers, and people like you who think in
> terms of "modern languages").
> 
> But for most people (and I contend that most (human) readers and
> writers of CTM fall into this category) the semi-colons will be
> useful as an aid to understanding the content, even though they
> might introduce some redundancy, because they mark the major
> structural boundaries within a topic block.
> 
> These people, not the programmers, are our primary audience for
> CTM, and their needs - optimal readability - should be our major
> concern. That, at least, was the Working Group's position at the
> Kyoto meeting.

Here is why your argumentation completely derails me:

I quite agree with you that our target audience should be not such
much the Java|Lisp|Prolog|Python|Perl programmers, but more the
computer savvy knowledge worker. But all syntax _you_ propose (curly
brackets, semicolons around every corner, commas, ...) seems all to
originate from a classical programming world.

If I look again at

   http://www.semagia.com/tmp/ctm-comparison.html

then the left column is clearly more closely to natural language. And
you yourself mentioned in an earlier post that you like to see this
move.

\rho