4.3 The Semantic Side

Now we're going to look at the semantic construction copmonent of our new implementation. As we've stated, we plan to use our framework with different semantic formalisms. So the semantic construction part we're going to implement can't stay fixed throughout the course. Rather, we'll explicitely want to change it from time to time. And of course we want to be able to do so with as few complications as possible. We'll add a call to an interface predicate (named combine/3) to each of our syntax rules. And when we want to upgrade to a different method of semantic construction, we'll often be able to do so by simply re-implementing combine/3.

Now we're going to look at the upper right (the reddish) side of our diagram: Semantic construction. As we've stated above, we plan to use our framework with different semantic formalisms. So the semantic construction part we're going to implement can't stay fixed throughout the course. Rather, we'll explicitely want to change it from time to time. And of course we want to be able to do so with as few complications as possible.

Let's recall an observation we made some time ago: Any systematic method of semantic construction has to use the information provided by syntactic structure. So one thing is for sure: As different as they may be, any of the formalisms for semantic construction we possibly come to use will have to communicate with our syntax component. We'll incorporate this insight into our framework as follows: We'll add a call to an interface predicate (named combine/3) to each of our syntax rules. And when we want to upgrade to a different method of semantic construction, we'll often be able to do so by simply re-implementing combine/3.

• 4.3.1 The Semantically Annotated Syntax Rules

• 4.3.2 Implementing combine/2 for Functional Application