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

[Robert Barta]

On Thu, Jan 31, 2008 at 06:14:11AM +0900, Jaeho Lee wrote:

> 	Robert Barta [rho at devc.at] wrote: 
> 	> 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.
> 

> To me and probably to people in other cultures, the left column is
> HORRIFIC to read.  Structural boundaries such as semi-colons are
> definitely needed for readability, IMHO, even in English.

I have difficulties to understand how a { ; } changes the readability. 
What could you suggest (in terms of order or placement) to make this 
more "natural" for (or neutral to), say, Korean?

\rho

> -----Original Message-----
> From: sc34wg3-bounces at isotopicmaps.org
> [mailto:sc34wg3-bounces at isotopicmaps.org] On Behalf Of Robert Barta
> Sent: Thursday, January 31, 2008 1:59 AM
> To: Discussion of ISO/IEC 13250 Topic Maps
> Subject: Re: [sc34wg3] CTM: Realistic use cases or toy examples?
> 
> 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
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