From nobody@digitalkingdom.org Mon Jul 10 18:41:38 2006 Received: with ECARTIS (v1.0.0; list lojban-beginners); Mon, 10 Jul 2006 18:41:38 -0700 (PDT) Received: from nobody by chain.digitalkingdom.org with local (Exim 4.62) (envelope-from ) id 1G07Fq-0004Vo-76 for lojban-beginners-real@lojban.org; Mon, 10 Jul 2006 18:41:38 -0700 Received: from ug-out-1314.google.com ([66.249.92.168]) by chain.digitalkingdom.org with esmtp (Exim 4.62) (envelope-from ) id 1G07Fj-0004Vc-Ln for lojban-beginners@lojban.org; Mon, 10 Jul 2006 18:41:37 -0700 Received: by ug-out-1314.google.com with SMTP id j40so1686699ugd for ; Mon, 10 Jul 2006 18:41:30 -0700 (PDT) DomainKey-Signature: a=rsa-sha1; q=dns; c=nofws; s=beta; d=gmail.com; h=received:message-id:date:from:to:subject:in-reply-to:mime-version:content-type:content-transfer-encoding:content-disposition:references; b=SNcvkqeT2uLJW6ZeYRSD9T1eAoKF9c2FnyLmkcKGP/Zrekr/seuaSy3//u/4whGaCGh9/ptQo8hb1UzpVhTwVHYGsC8LOYzDdOmqPelpSLU9v6ypgKo7ggmQDfO7eVhGEzP8ttSaolHKNCkG6rasn6gXCWiWIyDDQji1/NZKBfo= Received: by 10.67.101.8 with SMTP id d8mr438527ugm; Mon, 10 Jul 2006 18:41:29 -0700 (PDT) Received: by 10.67.30.12 with HTTP; Mon, 10 Jul 2006 18:41:29 -0700 (PDT) Message-ID: Date: Mon, 10 Jul 2006 21:41:29 -0400 From: "Jonathan Gibbons" To: lojban-beginners@lojban.org Subject: [lojban-beginners] Re: Enumerating in Lojban In-Reply-To: <20060710173540.GV3440@chain.digitalkingdom.org> MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1; format=flowed Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Content-Disposition: inline References: <1684503175.20060710193640@mail.ru> <925d17560607100826x2a37ffcfi69c9964cabf0b53@mail.gmail.com> <537d06d00607100919v70febc62u93929e72b0041c48@mail.gmail.com> <20060710164123.GS3440@chain.digitalkingdom.org> <20060710173540.GV3440@chain.digitalkingdom.org> X-Spam-Score: -2.2 (--) X-archive-position: 3408 X-ecartis-version: Ecartis v1.0.0 Sender: lojban-beginners-bounce@lojban.org Errors-to: lojban-beginners-bounce@lojban.org X-original-sender: jonored@gmail.com Precedence: bulk Reply-to: lojban-beginners@lojban.org X-list: lojban-beginners Ah, I think I see the trick. So, instead of using a grouping rule like everywhere else, with the elidable terminators they decided to just say that anything caught being ambiguous because of a lack of a terminator was to be thrown out of the language? such that rather than "le xekri ckafi" being disambiguated by a grouping rule like "tanru group tighter than descriptions", it's ungrammatical, because it could either be "(le xekri) ckafi" or "le (xekri ckafi)"? it really does seem more sensible to leave the string in the language and apply a grouping/precedence rule to get at the meaning, but yes, that behavior does seem non-context-free. A bit silly, but non-context-free. If, on the other hand, you use precedence and grouping, which is to say, the same sorts of mechanisms that have been neccessary even to get at what is meant by "1+2*3" rather than just say that yes, that is a valid mathematical formula, it seems reasonably doable to me; and "le xekri ckafi" has a meaning. It might not be what was intended, but it has an unambiguous meaning. I seem to recall quite a bit of talk of grouping in the reference grammar, though. CFGs are nice for describing languages, which is to say, sets of strings, and precedence and grouping rules are nice for picking particular derivations of a string to associate meaning with. -Jonathan