From nobody@digitalkingdom.org Wed Jul 12 19:54:57 2006 Received: with ECARTIS (v1.0.0; list lojban-list); Wed, 12 Jul 2006 19:54:57 -0700 (PDT) Received: from nobody by chain.digitalkingdom.org with local (Exim 4.62) (envelope-from ) id 1G0rLa-0004hJ-Jj for lojban-list-real@lojban.org; Wed, 12 Jul 2006 19:54:38 -0700 Received: from rlpowell by chain.digitalkingdom.org with local (Exim 4.62) (envelope-from ) id 1G0rLa-0004hC-AN for lojban-list@lojban.org; Wed, 12 Jul 2006 19:54:38 -0700 Date: Wed, 12 Jul 2006 19:54:38 -0700 To: lojban-list@lojban.org Subject: [lojban] Re: Is Lojban a CFG? (was Re: [lojban-beginners] Re: Enumerating in Lojban) Message-ID: <20060713025438.GG18359@chain.digitalkingdom.org> Mail-Followup-To: lojban-list@lojban.org References: <925d17560607120611r6cff869bw3d732846112bf96a@mail.gmail.com> <20060713010321.GE18359@chain.digitalkingdom.org> MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Disposition: inline In-Reply-To: User-Agent: Mutt/1.5.11+cvs20060403 From: Robin Lee Powell X-archive-position: 12170 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 10:28:36PM -0400, Jonathan Gibbons wrote: > On 7/12/06, Robin Lee Powell wrote: > > >> Probably because the alternative can be very unintuitive. > > [snip] > > >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. > > It'd look exactly like the grammar to handle it now would if you > replaced all of the "//" pairs with "[]", in the notation of > bnf.300, and there'd be a seperate mechanism, that by a formalism > such as associating an ordering and grouping with each rule, > defines a particular semantic meaning to associate with the > string. OK, see, once you have a seperate formalism for the semantics and the parsing, I'm no longer interested. The parser should return complete information about how the sentence parses, period. If you're just going to overlay an ad hoc "formalism" on top of CFGs to get what you want, how is that better than what we have now? [snip; yes I know what the example term grammar looks like] > Now, that's very ambiguous, so we disambiguate by defining that > rules (1) (2) and (3) are left-grouping, and imposing a precedence > order of (1) (2) (3) (4), such that (1) binds first, i.e. > preferentially matches the most, and (4) binds last, which is to > say, the least. See, this is my point; you're waving your hands and saying that these rules exist, but not how to define them. This implies to me that they exist outside of the CFG. Replacing CFG + adhocracy with different CFG + different adhocracy doesn't make anything better, at all. -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.