TML is the rosetta stone of compilers

capitanart (51)in #tauchain • 7 years ago (edited)

Click on the image to see it in 3d !!

When my imagination try to view it Tauchain and specifically TML, explodes with something so new and amazing. Automatically I try to associate it graphically with the Rosetta stone that was key to get to understand lost hieroglyphs and translate them to an understandable level. This is my way of explaining it is TML. @dana-edwards, @trafalgar, @kevinwong and Ohad himself are the ones to explain it with words and then I will extract some of his best explanations.

What is TML?

TML is the core component which will make Tauchain possible. TML is known as the Tau Meta Language. This technology is what will allow humans and machines to effectively communicate back and forth in an organized manner. Many people may be familiar with a compiler, but fewer are familiar with what is known as a compiler-compiler or parser generator. The approach taken by TML resembles that of a parser generator. To be specific, we have what is called partial evaluation.

From here we continue to the Internet of Languages. Using the meta-language which we call TML (Tau Meta-Language, can get impression from the ongoing work on github) users define new languages by specifying logical formulas to describe what it means for two documents in different languages to have same meaning. In other words, to define a new language, one needs to define how it translates a semantics-preserving translation into an existing language. Semantics in our scope is ontological (objects and relations), and not operational semantics as in programming languages. By that we get an internet of knowledge representation languages that make the choice of language to not matter. A document in one language can be routed (using TML programs) into different languages. (1)

As we already stressed that we don't deal with natural languages. Of course, theoretically, it might be the case that one day someone will program over TML something that can understand natural language completely, but we don't count on such an event. Indeed there are many formalisms of natural language that are quite close to the full language and comfortable for humans to work with (what we refer to "simple enough English that machines can understand"), so we can expect TML to process human-comprehensible languages to some extent. But TML is intended also for machine-only languages. For example one might want to convert a document into a formatted HTML or into a Wiki, or to convert a program in some high-level language to machine code, or to synthesize code from logic.

More generally, TML is intended to be a compiler-compiler. In order to be so efficiently and not having to consider the logic of the language[s] again and again with every compilation of documents written in it, we take the approach of Partial Evaluation, which gives rise to additional very desirable features for a compiler-compiler.(2)

The Rosetta Stone is a granodiorite stele, found in 1799, inscribed with three versions of a decree issued at Memphis, Egypt in 196 BC during the Ptolemaic dynasty on behalf of King Ptolemy V. The top and middle texts are in Ancient Egyptian using hieroglyphic script and Demotic script, respectively, while the bottom is in Ancient Greek. As the decree has only minor differences between the three versions, the Rosetta Stone proved to be the key to deciphering Egyptian hieroglyphs.(3)