From @YaleVM.YCC.YALE.EDU:LOJBAN@CUVMB.BITNET Wed Sep 1 20:33:19 1993 Received: from ELI.CS.YALE.EDU by NEBULA.SYSTEMSZ.CS.YALE.EDU via SMTP; Thu, 2 Sep 1993 00:35:31 -0400 Received: from YALEVM.YCC.YALE.EDU by eli.CS.YALE.EDU via SMTP; Thu, 2 Sep 1993 00:35:26 -0400 Message-Id: <199309020435.AA01709@eli.CS.YALE.EDU> Received: from CUVMB.CC.COLUMBIA.EDU by YaleVM.YCC.Yale.Edu (IBM VM SMTP V2R2) with BSMTP id 1639; Thu, 02 Sep 93 00:33:55 EDT Received: from CUVMB.COLUMBIA.EDU by CUVMB.CC.COLUMBIA.EDU (Mailer R2.07) with BSMTP id 3033; Thu, 02 Sep 93 00:36:46 EDT Date: Thu, 2 Sep 1993 00:33:19 EDT Reply-To: Logical Language Group Sender: Lojban list From: Logical Language Group Subject: Re: Parser X-To: matthew@CPDAPO.TELE.NOKIA.FI X-Cc: lojban@cuvmb.cc.columbia.edu To: Erik Rauch Status: RO X-Status: Neither the parser nor the glosser have been issued as products for any form. A couple of people have copies of each -call them Beta testers, though in reality it is because they are doing text reviews of texts posted by others or writing so much text that it is easier on John, Nora, and me to let other people use the tools as best as they can than to do it ourselves. Neither the parser nor the glosser is suitable as a commercial product. The parser actually has a little bit of a readme file; the glosser has even less. If you do perfect Lojban, the parser will confirm it by issuing a parsed output, but if you aren't familiar with the grammar, you will see such an output as approval, when it really means that it is time to start checking for the errors that the parser cannot catch (like the missing "cu" in the first line of your haiku - first attempt. Perfect Lojban but it doesn;t mean what you intended.) If you actually have a parser error, the parser's error reporting is not very helpful, and indeed is even misleading, as to what the problem is. Finally, thge parser John and I use always reflects the latest trial grammar and is not the baselined version. We cannot support a lot of people by issuing a new parser every time we change the grammar, therefore want to limit things to people who are "inner circle" enough that we generally are consulting with them on each such grammar change anyway. This is virtually synonymous with the people who write lots of Lojban text or review lots of Lojban text, of course. Saying this, the parser is written in fairly portable C, and both Unix and Dos versions exist. At the point when we are ready to make it commerically avaiavailable, it would not be much of a problem. However, the natur eof Unix systems has caused John to mention that we will probably have to distribute Unix parsers as source, whereas the MS-Dos parser is better distributed as executable. This is to some extent depndent on hardware, as well as on the nature of the type of people on each platform that will be using it. More people working on Unix systems are willing and indeed expectant of hacking around in the code, while people in the PC world tend to prefer pretty packaged stuff that works right the first time without us having to mess with it. Thus, before we isssue the parser, we have to settle policy issues about what forms we will issue and support it in, what pricing, how to distribuite it. Some people will argue strongly for a Free Software approach; others say that software is our one product that will make money and the people on-net are getting more than their share of LLG services (in the form of the list and elctronic distribution) tyhan they are paying for anyway. (I don't expect to argue these topics now - they've been argued many times without real resolution. Our bent is generally to promote more liberal distribution, but to try to protect our options - right now we have too few options to bother making a decision that might have to be changed. The glosser is among other things an attempt to fix the limitations of the parser. It presumes a parser otuput as input, and attempts to give an English fairly-literal translation. The limitation is that word-for-word Lojban is unreadbale unless you know the grammar almost well enough to read it without the glosser; what it does these days is save you time looking up wprds and rafsi that you know less than perfectly - but the gloss is so mindless that you need to knwo what the keywords mean grammatically in order to put the words together in a useful form. Nora has in mind improving this to the level of being a crude Lojban-to-English translator that actually uses the parse tree to intelligently choose expression form, but she has had little time for any Lojban work in the last year and other things are higher priority than the glosser. The glosser is written in Turbo-Pascal, with a highly specific-to-DOS screen interface module. You, Matthew, were at one time given an opportunity to play with the older LogFlash, which we tried to port to UNIX, and I don't recall hearing that you had any success. Nora's later TP code is more sophisticated and also bulkier since she has built this suite of common routines that make her programming of human interface virtually table driven. That earlier code had very detailed documentation; Nora has not had time to bother documenting the newer versions (and the large number of people who didn't effectively use the earlier code and documentation has strongly unmotivated her to bother with it again. Again, the glosser will probably eventually reach being a usable product, and we'll distribute it freely (or sell it). But not when we have more important things to do, like get some books published. We have considered putting the parser up installed in the IRC Lojbot, since we can live with executable dealing with a specific machine accessible to many netters, and have a commitment from the LojBot author to support the thing to keep the load of John and me. This is still in consideration. It isn't much of an option for the glosser, though. Comments are welcome on this whole topic, including people's opinions on what the policy should be when we set such a policy, but as I said above, I can't take time to argue the policy now, and I doubt that we are prepared to make any decisions in the near future - it would be a Board decision, and Nora hasn't had time to write up minutes from the LogFest meeting, much less prepare for a new decision meeting, even if the rest of us had time. lojbab