From nobody@digitalkingdom.org Tue Jul 11 11:35:15 2006 Received: with ECARTIS (v1.0.0; list lojban-beginners); Tue, 11 Jul 2006 11:35:15 -0700 (PDT) Received: from nobody by chain.digitalkingdom.org with local (Exim 4.62) (envelope-from ) id 1G0N4l-0007GT-57 for lojban-beginners-real@lojban.org; Tue, 11 Jul 2006 11:35:15 -0700 Received: from ug-out-1314.google.com ([66.249.92.175]) by chain.digitalkingdom.org with esmtp (Exim 4.62) (envelope-from ) id 1G0N4k-0007GL-3z for lojban-beginners@lojban.org; Tue, 11 Jul 2006 11:35:14 -0700 Received: by ug-out-1314.google.com with SMTP id j40so2013776ugd for ; Tue, 11 Jul 2006 11:35:12 -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=SAssBa7MopNSHqkfcDCYnZyCk0oD22sAFGpnLEpcwPvbx1JhPOHTjT91NVJ2kcdLySkr89RV+vLt38hfgMnnxF5tVeEUzyf15gpyh9qH7SgVggRKRcbJCSeo3hsXHVOmxbQ2hytcCtxEFboevZ8VhPytCKhtd9GzbClKDnQNKUs= Received: by 10.66.220.17 with SMTP id s17mr1361517ugg; Tue, 11 Jul 2006 11:35:12 -0700 (PDT) Received: by 10.67.30.12 with HTTP; Tue, 11 Jul 2006 11:35:12 -0700 (PDT) Message-ID: Date: Tue, 11 Jul 2006 14:35:12 -0400 From: "Jonathan Gibbons" To: lojban-beginners@lojban.org Subject: [lojban-beginners] Re: Enumerating in Lojban In-Reply-To: <20060711052439.GC10845@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> <20060711052439.GC10845@chain.digitalkingdom.org> X-Spam-Score: -2.2 (--) X-archive-position: 3412 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 > I'm sorry, I have no idea what you're talking about. Precedence of > "le xekri ckafi" is obviously handleable in CFGs, and has nothing > whatever to do with the difficulty of handling elidable terminators > in a formal language. Last I checked, that statement elides "ku", making it such that a plain CFG -- not a CFG to describe the language and precedence rules for the parser to determine which derivation to associate meaning to -- cannot easily have a single derivation for that string while supporting tanru, descriptions, and elidable terminators. The question that determines whether it is context-free is whether or not a statement merely has another meaning because of the erroneous elision of a terminator, and therefore is still in the language, or is ungrammatical for that reason alone. I have read those pages, and what you've been saying. It just doesn't make much sense to me, using what looks to be a contextual parser (if not turing-complete, I've been trying to construct a proof one way or the other for about a day showing equivalency to the lambda calculus, but don't really have the time to dedicate to it) for a language that certainly seems context-free to me just because a parser that can only handle a very restricted subset of context-free grammars (which is to say, LALR(1)) cannot handle it. I've seen a whole lot of "I believe" and not much of any "I know", and am trying to figure out what the vague references to "The Right Thing" you keep making actually mean. I have also been working on writing a transformation code to go from the EBNF that bnf.300 uses to one that fits bison's input format, with elidable terminators as optional elements. All that's left to do the job of a CFG (which is just determining if a derivation exists) is to define a lexer, because I don't want to bother writing what is more conveniently described by other expressions in a CFG, and to make a program that finds the preferable derivation should just require defining a set of precedence and grouping rules. I've been trying to figure out how in the world the behavior of elidable terminators is non-context-free from the point of view of a parser, and mostly failing, unless it is by meaning that some strings are not in the language because of grammatical ambiguity, while others are in the language regardless of grammatical ambiguity.