From nobody@digitalkingdom.org Tue Jul 04 23:44:15 2006 Received: with ECARTIS (v1.0.0; list lojban-beginners); Tue, 04 Jul 2006 23:44:15 -0700 (PDT) Received: from nobody by chain.digitalkingdom.org with local (Exim 4.62) (envelope-from ) id 1Fy17O-0006g7-Ve for lojban-beginners-real@lojban.org; Tue, 04 Jul 2006 23:44:15 -0700 Received: from ms-smtp-01.texas.rr.com ([24.93.47.40]) by chain.digitalkingdom.org with esmtp (Exim 4.62) (envelope-from ) id 1Fy17K-0006g0-SR for lojban-beginners@lojban.org; Tue, 04 Jul 2006 23:44:14 -0700 Received: from [192.168.1.103] (cpe-66-68-161-49.austin.res.rr.com [66.68.161.49]) by ms-smtp-01.texas.rr.com (8.13.6/8.13.6) with ESMTP id k656i7Sg027556 for ; Wed, 5 Jul 2006 01:44:07 -0500 (CDT) Message-ID: <44AB5FB7.2010609@hypermetrics.com> Date: Wed, 05 Jul 2006 01:44:07 -0500 From: Hal Fulton User-Agent: Mozilla Thunderbird 1.0RC1 (X11/20041209) X-Accept-Language: en-us, en MIME-Version: 1.0 To: lojban-beginners@lojban.org Subject: [lojban-beginners] Re: RK-like diagramming: Anyone interested? References: <44AAC810.2070300@hypermetrics.com> <44AADE4C.3080601@hypermetrics.com> <200607042148.25751.phma@phma.optus.nu> In-Reply-To: Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1; format=flowed Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit X-Virus-Scanned: Symantec AntiVirus Scan Engine X-Spam-Score: -2.6 (--) X-archive-position: 3335 X-ecartis-version: Ecartis v1.0.0 Sender: lojban-beginners-bounce@lojban.org Errors-to: lojban-beginners-bounce@lojban.org X-original-sender: hal9000@hypermetrics.com Precedence: bulk Reply-to: lojban-beginners@lojban.org X-list: lojban-beginners Jonathan Gibbons wrote: > > Might try coming up with a graphical representation appealing to > myself. It seems to me that it might also be worthwhile to have a > similar map of the lojban grammar, as well. Would certainly solidify > my knowledge of the nitty-gritty of the language. A map, that's an interesting way of putting it. By any chance were you ever a Pascal programmer? To me, the "railroad" notation was the simplest, clearest description of language syntax I ever saw. Examples in the classic Wirth books and so on. Apparently there are some examples here: http://www2.sis.pitt.edu/~sbrass/ds99_2/c2_2.ps and some very garish ones here: http://homepage.mac.com/lucaswagner/raskin/ When I wrote a simple compiler of my own, I didn't use yacc or any such thing. I wrote a hand-written recursive descent parser from scratch. And I found that syntax diagrams were easy to write from: A loop was a literal cycle in the diagram, and an alternative was an if or case type of construct. It almost parsed itself. > Does anyone happen to know if the EBNF grammar at > http://www.lojban.org/publications/formal-grammars/bnf.300 is complete > in the sense that if you replaced all the words in a text with their > terminal symbols and used the information in the EBNF grammar, you > wouldn't fail on any important structures? (both because I want to > know if that'd be an appropriate source to work from in doing such a > graphical representation of the grammar, and beause I'd kinda like to > see a computer version using Bison's GLR feature, if that's possible, > to make a more readable computer form.) The real status of that grammar is something interesting to me, but I'm not a "real" grammar/parser guy. Refer to Robin Powell's page: http://www.digitalkingdom.org/~rlpowell/hobbies/lojban/grammar/ I don't know how up-to-date it is -- I assume this stuff doesn't change as fast as we'd like. Hal