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Form

The only primitives of the languages, i.e., the performatives, convey the communicative act and the actions to be taken as a result. Thus the form should be deemed to be declarative. In format, KQML messages are linear streams of characters with a Lisp-like syntax. Although this formatting is irrelevant to the functions of the language, it makes the messages easy to read, to parse and to convert to other formats. The syntax is simple and allows for the addition of new parameters, if deemed necessary, in a future revision of the language.