Lisp is not particularly well suited for interfacing to complex , structured objects , and it was not our intention to embark on a major effort involving the development of a formal model of a dictionary ( of the style described in , eg. , Tompa 1986 ) ; on the other hand a method of access was clearly required , which was flexible enough to support a range of applications intending to make use of the LDOCE tape .
database design for a dictionary of the future
Frank Tompa
In addition , in order to link the machine readable version of LDOCE to our development environment , and eventually to our natural language processing systems , we need to provide fast access from Lisp to data held in secondary storage . Lisp is not particularly well suited for interfacing to complex , structured objects , and it was not our intention to embark on a major effort involving the development of a formal model of a dictionary ( of the style described in , eg. , Tompa 1986 ) ; on the other hand a method of access was clearly required , which was flexible enough to support a range of applications intending to make use of the LDOCE tape . The requirement for having the dictionary entries in a form convenient for symbolic manipulation from within Lisp was furthermore augmented by the constraint that all the information present in the typesetting tape should be carried over to the on-line version of LDOCE , since it is impossible to say in advance which records and fields of an entry would , or would not , be of potential use to a natural language processing program .
Lisp is not particularly well suited for interfacing to complex , structured objects , and it was not our intention to embark on a major effort involving the development of a formal model of a dictionary ( of the style described in , eg. , @@CITATION ) ; on the other hand a method of access was clearly required , which was flexible enough to support a range of applications intending to make use of the LDOCE tape .