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\address 
Steven O. Kimbrough
Department of Decision Sciences
The Wharton School
University of Pennsylvania
Philadelphia, PA 19104-6366

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Ronald M. Lee
Department of General Business
The University of Texas
Austin, TX 78712

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Gentlemen:

	Terry Winograd sent me a copy of your
``On Illocutionary Logic as a Telecommunications Language''.
I'm glad to see activity in the direction of a language for
communicating among computer programs belonging to different
organizations.
Enclosed are copies of my ``Common Business Communication Language''
on the same subject.  The paper was originally written in 1975 and
somewhat modified when it was published in 1983.

	I have a few preliminary comments on your paper.

	1. While business messages have illocutionary content,
basing the whole approach on Searle's version of illocutionary logic
seems like overkill on one aspect of the problem.  Moreover, I believe
that when you get around to actually devising a language, even for
a small subset of business communications, you will find that Searle's
imagination was inadequate to classify the illocutionary content of
the communications.

	2. Basing the approach on Prolog seems arbitrary.  The point of
Prolog is that a certain subset of logic is directly executable as program.
It doesn't seem to me that the main way messages will be used is to
directly execute them.

	3. To me the most problematic aspects of the problem were associated
with the non-monotonic aspects of communication, especially business
communication.  Much is inferred from what is left out of a message,
and these non-monotonic inferences have even legal force.  For example,
if the means of delivery isn't specified, then any standard method will
do.

	CBCL isn't currently an active project in my group.  A few years
ago, SRI International took it up briefly but were unable to get sponsorship.

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Sincerely,       

John McCarthy    
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Enclosure
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