From rlpowell@digitalkingdom.org Thu May 13 14:27:55 2004 Received: with ECARTIS (v1.0.0; list lojban-list); Thu, 13 May 2004 14:27:55 -0700 (PDT) Received: from rlpowell by chain.digitalkingdom.org with local (Exim 4.32) id 1BONk5-0001Rm-74 for lojban-list@lojban.org; Thu, 13 May 2004 14:27:49 -0700 Date: Thu, 13 May 2004 14:27:49 -0700 To: lojban-list@lojban.org Subject: [lojban] Re: y: what is it good for? Message-ID: <20040513212749.GW4461@digitalkingdom.org> Mail-Followup-To: lojban-list@lojban.org References: <20040513183600.GJ4461@digitalkingdom.org> <20040513193917.GC16333@fysh.org> <20040513211121.GS4461@digitalkingdom.org> <20040513212140.GF16333@fysh.org> Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Disposition: inline In-Reply-To: <20040513212140.GF16333@fysh.org> User-Agent: Mutt/1.5.5.1+cvs20040105i From: Robin Lee Powell X-archive-position: 7804 X-ecartis-version: Ecartis v1.0.0 Sender: lojban-list-bounce@lojban.org Errors-to: lojban-list-bounce@lojban.org X-original-sender: rlpowell@digitalkingdom.org Precedence: bulk Reply-to: lojban-list@lojban.org X-list: lojban-list On Thu, May 13, 2004 at 10:21:40PM +0100, Zefram wrote: > Robin Lee Powell wrote: > >Not a special case? How is an erase word that doesn't erase anything > >not a special case? > > It's exactly as special as the other erasure words. Among the erasure > words its difference from the others is exactly the same type of > difference they have from each other: how much they erase. Erasing > nothing is a unique meaning, but every cmavo has a unique meaning. > > It's not-a-special-case in the sense that no mechanisms are required > solely to support it. It's just part of the erasure system. Sorry, I wasn't able to see the forest for the trees. *Every* erasure word requires heaps of grammatical wrangling; talking about "the erasure system" as a unified whole just makes no sense to me at this point. Each erasure word is handled *utterly* differently. Removing SI, SA and SU would literally *halve* the size of the PEG grammar. I'm not kidding. rlpowell@chain> wc -l ../lojban.peg 1187 ../lojban.peg rlpowell@chain> egrep -v "(S[IAU]|-sa-)" ../lojban.peg | wc -l 667 To be fair, most of that is SA handling, but still. -Robin -- http://www.digitalkingdom.org/~rlpowell/ *** I'm a *male* Robin. "Many philosophical problems are caused by such things as the simple inability to shut up." -- David Stove, liberally paraphrased. http://www.lojban.org/ *** loi pimlu na srana .i ti rokci morsi