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<Paper uid="P84-1075">
  <Title>The Design of a Computer Language for Linguistic Information</Title>
  <Section position="5" start_page="364" end_page="365" type="concl">
    <SectionTitle>
3. Conclusion
</SectionTitle>
    <Paragraph position="0"> The PATR-II formalism was designed as a computer language for encoding linguistic information. The design was influenced by current theory and practice in computer science, and especially in the arenas of programming language design and semantics. The formalism is simple (consisting of just one primitive operation, unification), powerful (although it can be constrained to be decidable), mathematieally well-founded (with a complete denotational semantics), flexible (as demonstrated by its ability to model analyses in GPSG, LFG, DCG and other formalisms), modular (because of its higher-level notational devices such as templates and lexical rules), declarative (yielding order-independence of operations), and implementable (as demonstrated by three quite dissimilar implemented systems and one highly developed programming environment).</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="1">  As we have ,mq)hasized herein, PATR-II seems to repl'OSO.l'it. ~'I c(~nvol'~(.llCC of techniques from several domains-comt)utor science, programming language design, natural language processing and linguistics. Its positioning at the center of these trends arises, however, not from the admixture of many discrete techniques, but rather from the application of a single simple yet powerful concept to the encoding of linguistic information.</Paragraph>
  </Section>
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