You bring up what to me is a critical missing ingredient in most computer communications:

a command is a kind of speech act.

consider the _expression_ of a proposition

cat  in box

this gives us a picture of the way something in the world *could* be

a command is a direction to some actor to make the proposition true:

command to Tom (cat in box)

in English, "tom, put the cat in the box"

similary, a question is a speech act

question (cat in box)

in English: is the cat in the box?

invarient rule (cat in box)

in English" the cat must be in the box at all times

statement (cat in box)

In English: the cat IS in the box.

so could be

hope (cat in box)

like when (cat in box)


So, when one systems just sends another a picture of a transaction, what is missing is whether this is a request to make execute the transaction, and what system is expected to carry out the request, versus whether this is an assertion that the transaction has been exectuted, and by whom, etc

When the speech act and the actors are made explicit, the two communcating systems are more loosely coupled to each other, and better interoperation can be achieved.






--
William Frank

413/376-8167


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