Re: What language could be written "Matrix"

Aatu Koskensilta wrote:
Pascal Bourguignon wrote:

You can't complain, there are a number of movies that are quite
formally specified:

Toy Story
The Incredible
Finding nemo
Monsters Inc
For the Birds
Cars
etc.


Unfortunately the scripts of these movies were probably written in a language with no formally specified semantics. This makes correctness proofs virtually impossible, for example, even though mathematically sound methods were used at some point of the implementation process. I wonder if the Lisp society has tried to address this shortcoming, or whether some statically typed language would be better suited for writing movie scripts.


Well, the dialog within the scripts may or may not have formal semantics, depending on how much you believe in Chomsky's theories. The semantics of the scripts themselves, however, are about as rigid as you can get without resorting to all those squiggly greek characters. Scripts that don't conform to the industry's formatting rules have no chance of getting read, much less produced.

Lispers interested in formal semantics? Sure -- they're called 'Schemers'. Common Lisp's semantics are informally specified and buggy[1], and nobody's too interested in fixing them. Heck, even Schemers disagree as to how formally Scheme is specified[2]


1. http://groups.google.com/group/comp.lang.lisp/msg/3a8bcfef0500c8f9
2. http://srfi.schemers.org/srfi-75/mail-archive/msg00143.html
.

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