From nobody@digitalkingdom.org Wed Jul 12 19:44:05 2006 Received: with ECARTIS (v1.0.0; list lojban-list); Wed, 12 Jul 2006 19:44:06 -0700 (PDT) Received: from nobody by chain.digitalkingdom.org with local (Exim 4.62) (envelope-from ) id 1G0rB4-0004WX-St for lojban-list-real@lojban.org; Wed, 12 Jul 2006 19:43:46 -0700 Received: from ug-out-1314.google.com ([66.249.92.174]) by chain.digitalkingdom.org with esmtp (Exim 4.62) (envelope-from ) id 1G0rB1-0004WP-Rc for lojban-list@lojban.org; Wed, 12 Jul 2006 19:43:46 -0700 Received: by ug-out-1314.google.com with SMTP id u40so103254ugc for ; Wed, 12 Jul 2006 19:43:42 -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=tGSUgJGw9usre4hkTFtmjwePPe71eyvDvPLqVc/pHhSyYgWBQ2TZMkVYrjR62G+nAXUEljBGvrAWQLGAqWRuhPn5w5v/bsamIM92ugDKvg/fDEffQFor1oyofdNkeHQMt0OXu6kJznFL2J+Je34j1j1QoiE4jNDO21nqLHyg/FA= Received: by 10.67.26.7 with SMTP id d7mr80381ugj; Wed, 12 Jul 2006 19:43:42 -0700 (PDT) Received: by 10.67.30.12 with HTTP; Wed, 12 Jul 2006 19:43:42 -0700 (PDT) Message-ID: Date: Wed, 12 Jul 2006 22:43:42 -0400 From: "Jonathan Gibbons" To: lojban-list@lojban.org Subject: [lojban] Re: Is Lojban a CFG? (was Re: [lojban-beginners] Re: Enumerating in Lojban) In-Reply-To: <20060713013545.GF18359@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: <20060713003616.GD18359@chain.digitalkingdom.org> <20060713013545.GF18359@chain.digitalkingdom.org> X-Spam-Score: -2.3 (--) X-archive-position: 12169 X-ecartis-version: Ecartis v1.0.0 Sender: lojban-list-bounce@lojban.org Errors-to: lojban-list-bounce@lojban.org X-original-sender: jonored@gmail.com Precedence: bulk Reply-to: lojban-list@lojban.org X-list: lojban-list > "on the semantic side of things" is inherently bad, to my mind. > What comes out of the parser should be the way a human would process > it if at all possible; in the cases we're talking about, a human > would say "na'i" or "ki'a"; I expect the parser to as well. Ah, but a CFG does not define a parser. It defines a language, that's all. Defining aspects of what ought to come out of a program that is parsing an input is not part of that job. The class of programs being referred to as parsers also generally do not output the same language as they input; they output some other representation of the meaning of the input string. A human would probably take a shot at understanding what the person who made the erroneous/unintuitive statement was saying, rather than stop and give up; why shouldn't a program do the same? And all that it would be doing is taking a set of rules to determine unambiguously what /meaning/ is associated with this string. Requiring the CFG to be unambiguous on every string in the language - that is, to have exactly one derivation - tends to be quite unweildy when all you really want to do is eliminate semantic ambiguity - have exactly one meaning associated with every string in the language. 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.