From nobody@digitalkingdom.org Wed Jul 12 19:56:00 2006 Received: with ECARTIS (v1.0.0; list lojban-list); Wed, 12 Jul 2006 19:56:00 -0700 (PDT) Received: from nobody by chain.digitalkingdom.org with local (Exim 4.62) (envelope-from ) id 1G0rMc-0004i8-LO for lojban-list-real@lojban.org; Wed, 12 Jul 2006 19:55:42 -0700 Received: from rlpowell by chain.digitalkingdom.org with local (Exim 4.62) (envelope-from ) id 1G0rMc-0004i1-BA for lojban-list@lojban.org; Wed, 12 Jul 2006 19:55:42 -0700 Date: Wed, 12 Jul 2006 19:55:42 -0700 To: lojban-list@lojban.org Subject: [lojban] Re: Is Lojban a CFG? (was Re: [lojban-beginners] Re: Enumerating in Lojban) Message-ID: <20060713025542.GH18359@chain.digitalkingdom.org> Mail-Followup-To: lojban-list@lojban.org References: <20060713003616.GD18359@chain.digitalkingdom.org> <20060713013545.GF18359@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: 12171 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 10:43:42PM -0400, Jonathan Gibbons wrote: > >"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. Yes, that's one of the reasons I don't have much attachment to them. > 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. And yet Lojban has the former property in all its current parsers, and people are very, very happy that way as far as I can tell. -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.