10.5 Implementing Lambda Calculus
Our decision to perform semantic construction with the aid of an abstract "glue" language (namely,
-calculus) has pleasant consequences for grammar writing, so we would like to make the key combinatorial mechanisms (functional application and
-conversion), available as black boxes to the grammar writer. From a grammar engineering perspective, this is a sensible thing to do: when writing fragments we should be free to concentrate on linguistic issues.
In this section we build the required black box. With such a black box available, we will be able to use a little DCG for semantic construction. We will decorate a slightly extended version of our
dCGExample.pl(known from Chapter 5) with extremely natural semantic construction code and start building representations.