Re: Keeping PowerLoom around as a daemon?

On Jun 22, 2008, at 5:21 PM, Rich Morin wrote:

>   http://cfcl.com/twiki/bin/view/Projects/Arti/Patterns/RubyKif_H2
>
> While I work on parsing comments and emitting KIF generally, I'm
> hoping that some folks here will be willing to look over my notes
> and let me know if I'm missing (or misinterpreting) anything.

In general this looks pretty good, but I'm not familiar with Ruby at  
all, so take that for what it's worth.  I see you have introduced  
some mechanism for handling characters that aren't supported in Ruby  
symbol names.

I will note that there are some areas where PowerLoom is a bit  
different from KIF, but they are fairly minor.

One is that PowerLoom will use "keyword symbols" which are symbols  
that start with a colon.  This is often used to specify options to  
various PowerLoom commands, such as definitions like:

   (defconcept person (?x) :=> (animal ?x))

   (retrieve all (person ?x) :dont-optimize? true)
      ;; Note the "?" at the end of the keyword.

Also, one difference is that Stella (and by extension PowerLoom) uses  
the "@" marker for different purposes than KIF.  Normally you  
shouldn't encounter any @-symbols in PowerLoom.  But we don't use  
them for row variables.  Instead they identify surrogate symbols.