From nobody@digitalkingdom.org Wed Jul 12 18:03:46 2006 Received: with ECARTIS (v1.0.0; list lojban-list); Wed, 12 Jul 2006 18:03:47 -0700 (PDT) Received: from nobody by chain.digitalkingdom.org with local (Exim 4.62) (envelope-from ) id 1G0pc0-0003AQ-75 for lojban-list-real@lojban.org; Wed, 12 Jul 2006 18:03:28 -0700 Received: from rlpowell by chain.digitalkingdom.org with local (Exim 4.62) (envelope-from ) id 1G0pbt-0003AB-Gy for lojban-list@lojban.org; Wed, 12 Jul 2006 18:03:28 -0700 Date: Wed, 12 Jul 2006 18:03:21 -0700 To: lojban-list@lojban.org Subject: [lojban] Re: Is Lojban a CFG? (was Re: [lojban-beginners] Re: Enumerating in Lojban) Message-ID: <20060713010321.GE18359@chain.digitalkingdom.org> Mail-Followup-To: lojban-list@lojban.org References: <925d17560607120611r6cff869bw3d732846112bf96a@mail.gmail.com> MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Disposition: inline In-Reply-To: <925d17560607120611r6cff869bw3d732846112bf96a@mail.gmail.com> User-Agent: Mutt/1.5.11+cvs20060403 From: Robin Lee Powell X-archive-position: 12164 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 Wed, Jul 12, 2006 at 10:11:52AM -0300, Jorge Llamb?as wrote: > On 7/12/06, Jonathan Gibbons wrote: > >why not just state "Lojban is left-grouping by default" to > >disambiguate the whole set of these statements, rather than > >deciding "that's not Lojban"? (left-grouping being the same > >concept as leftmost-derivation) [snip] > >I'm really wondering why that design decision was made. I'll > >probably quiet down about it soon, though. > > Probably because the alternative can be very unintuitive. Another > example: > > li pa pa pa pa moi > > That's ungrammatical, but > > li pa pa pa boi pa moi > > is grammatical. I think breaking a string of digits by some > precedence rule would be unintuitive. Jonathan, I'd like to see an example of a CFG that would handle the above by any rule at all. Just out of curiousity. I find the general idea interesting; I'm going to have to ponder it a bit. I think, though, that most people would rather the parser reject a sentence like: le nu le gleki prenu klama cinri rather than turn it into the equivalent of: le nu le gleki ku prenu ku klama cinri when the user obviously intended: le nu le gleki prenu ku klama ku cinri This (the current behaviour) seems to me to reduce the chances for confusion *substantially*. But then I haven't thought about it much yet. -Robin -- http://www.digitalkingdom.org/~rlpowell/ *** http://www.lojban.org/ Reason #237 To Learn Lojban: "Homonyms: Their Grate!" Proud Supporter of the Singularity Institute - http://singinst.org/ To unsubscribe from this list, send mail to lojban-list-request@lojban.org with the subject unsubscribe, or go to http://www.lojban.org/lsg2/, or if you're really stuck, send mail to secretary@lojban.org for help.