in TWLT10 - Algebraic Methods in Language Processing - AMiLP95, 1995
It is becoming normal that a document should serve several purposes. However, the majority of available text processors is purpose-oriented, reducing the necessary flexibility and reusability of documents. Some waste of time arises from adapting the same text to each different purpose, when this task could be done automatically (from the first version of the document) with an appropriate system. This communication highlights the guidelines to build a system to solve the above problem. Such a system should be an algebraic based environment and provide facilities for: Document type definitions; Definition of Function over document types; Document definitions as algebraic terms. This approach (rooted in the tradition of construtive algebraic specification models ), will allow for an homogeneous environment to deal with operations such as merging documents, converting formats, extracting portions of documents, and some other unusual operations like mail reply and literate programming. We intend to build on camila (a specification language and prototyping environment developed at Universidade do Minho, by the Computer Science group) developing the above mentioned system as one of its extensions.
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