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Editor: On "Learning Language" I was dismayed by the inclusion of William Katke's article ("Learning Language Using A Pattern Recognition Approach," Spring 1985). Usually you do an excellent job of representing "the current state of the art in Artificial Intelligence" (to quote your Editorial Policy), but I consider this article an exception. First of all, although the article claims to be on "Learning Language," what it presents is at best a knowledge-free approach to learning syntax. I saw no evidence that the induced syntax is useful for anything, and good reasons to believe that it is not, such as the unmnemonic category names and the intrinsic limitations of finite state grammars. Second, this kind of stuff has been done before, and it didn't work too well then either; for a useful overview of the field and pointers into the literature, see the article on "Grammatical Inference" in Volume 3 of The Handbook of The plete specifications and the verification of proposed impleideas and issues presented were firmly focused on a conven-mentations, we should concentrate more on incremental tional view of the design process-a view I can caricaturize development of specifications as a result of assessment of as the SPIV methodology: performance.