[alicebot-archcomm] modest proposal

[Dr. Richard S. Wallace]

> 1. There's no explanation why it's necessary.

To keep the proposal as brief as possible.  The explanation (for me) is that
the one of the very first AIML tag you would like to teach people is <get
name="name"/> which is confusing.

> 2. As a label choice, "var" is regressive from "name".  The latter is a
> whole word, but the former is not.  AIML is supposed to be easy to
> learn; one characteristic of things that are easy to learn is that they
> avoid abbreviations.

(see 1)

> 3. There's a lot of existing AIML already in the world.  We already went
> through a lot of discussion about several alternative proposed syntaxes,
> and settled on some forms that seem to work (at least no one has yet
> voiced objections) and people have been using those for some time now.
> Moving to "deprecate" something before a standard is even finalized
> [!!!] will waste time and/or money for people who have to change
> existing AIML to fit, and will suggest that the word "standard" has
> little meaning for us....

"Deprecated AIML tags are functions that are supported only for backward
compatibility, and the Alicebot server may generate a warning message
whenever one of these is used. It is recommended that AIML programs be
modified to eliminate the use of deprecated tags, though there are no
current plans to remove such tags entirely from the standard."

In other words, <get name="name"/> is not going away anytime soon.

Rich

>
> On Thu, 2002-03-14 at 05:10, Dr. Richard S. Wallace wrote:
> > Deprecate 'name=' in favor of 'var'= in <set> and <get>.
> >
> > E.g. write <set var="name">Dorothy</set> instead of
> > <set name="name">Dorothy</set>.
> >
> > Dr. Rich
> >
> > _______________________________________________
> > alicebot-archcomm mailing list
> > alicebot-archcomm@list.alicebot.org
> > http://list.alicebot.org/mailman/listinfo/alicebot-archcomm
> >
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> alicebot-archcomm mailing list
> alicebot-archcomm@list.alicebot.org
> http://list.alicebot.org/mailman/listinfo/alicebot-archcomm