The Next 700 Programming Languages by P. J. Landin.
ABSTRACT:
A family of unimplemented computing languages is described that is intended to span differences of application area by a unified framework. This framework dictates the rules about the uses of user-coined names, and the conventions about characterizing functional relationships. Within this framework ‘lhe design of a specific language splits into two independent parts. One is the choice of written appearances of programs (or more generally, their physical representation). The other is the choice of the abstract entities (such as numbers, character-strings, lists of them, functional relations among them) that can be referred to in the language.
The system is biased towards “expressions” rather than “statements.” It includes a nonprocedural (purely functional) subsystem that aims to expand the class of users’ needs that can be met by a single print-instruction, without sacrificing the important properties that make conventional right-hand-side expressions easy to construct and understand.
The introduction to this paper reminded me of an acronym, SWIM (See What I Mean) that was coined to my knowledge by Michel Biezunski several years ago:
Most programming languages are partly a way of expressing things in terms of other things and partly a basic set of given things. The ISWIM (If you See What I Mean) system is a byproduct of an attempt to disentangle these two aspects in some current languages.
This attempt has led the author to think that many linguistic idiosyncracies are concerned with the former rather than the latter, whereas aptitude for a particular class of tasks is essentially determined by the latter rather than the former. The conclusion follows that many language characteristics are irrelevant to the alleged problem orientation.
ISWIM is an attempt at a general purpose system for describing things in terms of other things, that can be problem-oriented by appropriate choice of “primitives.” So it is not a language so much as a family of languages, of which each member is the result of choosing a set of primitives. The possibilities concerning this set and what is needed to specify such a set are discussed below.
The essence of topic maps is captured by:
ISWIM is an attempt at a general purpose system for describing things in terms of other things, that can be problem-oriented by appropriate choice of “primitives.”
Every information system has a set of terms, the meaning of which are known to its designers and/or users.
Data integration issues arise from the description of terms, “in terms of other things,” being known only to designers and users.
The power of topic maps comes from the expression of descriptions “in terms of other things,” for terms.
Other designers or users can examine those descriptions to see if they recognize any terms similar to those they know by other descriptions.
If they discover descriptions they consider to be of same thing, they can then create a mapping of those terms.
Hopefully using the descriptions as a basis for the mapping. A mapping of term to term only multiplies the opaqueness of the terms.
For some systems, Social Security Administration databases for example, descriptions of terms “in terms of other things” may not be part of the database itself. But descriptions maintained as “best practice” to facilitate later maintenance and changes.
For other systems, U.S. Intelligence community as another example, still chasing the will-o’-the-wisp* of standard terminology for non-standard terms, even the possibility of interchange depends on the development of description of terms “in terms of other things.”
Before you ask, yes, yes the Topic Maps Data Model (TMDM) and the various Topic Maps syntaxes are terms that can be described “in terms of other things.”
The advantage of the TMDM and relevant syntaxes is that even if not described “in terms of other things,” standardized terms enable interchange of a class of mappings. The default identification mapping in the TMDM being by IRIs.
Before and since Landin’s article we have been producing terms that could be described “in terms of other things.” In CS and other areas of human endeavor as well.
Isn’t it about time we starting describing our terms rather than clamoring for one set of undescribed terms or another?
* I use the term will-o’-the-wisp quite deliberately.
After decades of failure to create universal information systems with computers, following on centuries of non-computer failures to reach the same goal, following on millennia of semantic and linguistic diversity, someone knows attempts at universal information systems will leave intelligence agencies not sharing critical data.
Perhaps the method you choose says a great deal about the true goals of your project.
I first saw this in a tweet by CompSciFact.
