Re: Cactus Language • Preliminaries 9
Re: Cactus Language • Discussion 1
Re: Alex Shkotin

AS:

Interesting language.  It’s unusual to treat “ ” as a sentence.  Usually it is just a separator for other lexemes.

Are the following correct?

• One blank in brackets i.e. is a sentence.
• Two blanks in brackets i.e. is not a sentence.

Are the three strings below sentences?

• 
• 
• 

And at last.  You use your own notation to define formal language.  Is it correct that this language is context‑free?

Thanks for the questions, Alex,

As I mentioned in the first discussion post, the current presentation of Cactus Language is rather abstract and formal because that’s what we need to implement a fully computational parser for the family of languages we have in mind.  That is all well and good but it does leave us hanging when it comes to motivation and remembering why we are bothering with such a mass of formal detail.

When I find myself getting lost in syntactic abstractions it’s a good idea to stop and remind myself what led me to explore the computational powers of cactus graphs in the first place.  In my case it began with C.S. Peirce’s and Spencer Brown’s systems of logical graphs.  Two developments of that work which take up the story much nearer to scratch can be found on the following pages.

• Logical Graphs • First Impressions
• Logical Graphs • Formal Development

Short answers to the above questions —

• One blank in brackets i.e. is a sentence.
• Two blanks in brackets i.e. is a sentence.
  (Blanks can be concatenated any number of times.)
• All three of the other strings listed above are sentences.

Finally, I think cactus languages are context‑free as I think the last best grammars I constructed for them are context‑free, but that is one of those hazy memories I’ll need to check out on the current pass through the material.

Resources

• Cactus Language • Preliminaries
• Survey of Animated Logical Graphs
• Survey of Theme One Program

cc: Academia.edu • BlueSky • Laws of Form • Ma^thstodon • Research Gate
cc: Conceptual Graphs • Cybernetics • Structural Modeling • Systems Science