Message-Id: <199512111840.UAA17990@xiron.pc.helsinki.fi>
Date:         Mon, 11 Dec 1995 13:39:42 -0500
Reply-To: Logical Language Group <lojbab@ACCESS.DIGEX.NET>
Sender: Lojban list <LOJBAN@CUVMB.BITNET>
From: Logical Language Group <lojbab@ACCESS.DIGEX.NET>
Subject:      Re: TECH: PROPOSED GRAMMAR CHANGE X6: Simplification of compound
              tenses
To:         jorge@PHYAST.PITT.EDU
Cc:         lojban@cuvmb.cc.columbia.edu
Content-Length: 1891
Lines: 33

Well, I;ll start by noting that half of your discussion deals with using
tenses inside selbri (NOTE 2) which is NOT part of your X6 change.

Second, you have mostly been making proposals that deal with things in the
preparser/lexer, and these changes are VERY difficult to check out with
any certainty.  The risk factor is high, even if we were sure the change is
virtuous.  We cannot afford high risk changes at this point.

Third, this is now the 6th proposal you have made in less tha a month, when
we managed to go almost 2 years with only a couple of proposals.  If indeed
the language was in such bad shape that it needed 6 change proposals in a
month, then I would again retreat from having a baseline, and forego yet
again the idea of getting a stable language.  Do you REALLY think things
are so broken as to warrant the volume of changes you are proposing?  Even if
 they are"only" extensions, they are still changes.

fourth.  Whta it appears you are doing in X6 is freeing up the grammar
of tense as much as is possible, and doing so suppoosedly in the interest of
"ease of teaching".  Yet you have also proposed that we ADD structure to
MEX quantifiers (PA-strings) for the same reason.  Sow hich is easier to
teach, more structure or less?  In the case of tense we were able to
devise a YACCABLe grammar for tenses that allowed saying everything that pc
said needed to be said with tense, and then some.  In the cas eof  MEX, there
is no one person we could use as a standard for "all the things that need
to be said".

Fifth - you persist in proposing changes to the EBNF.  The language is
defined by the YACC grammar and not the EBNF.  I do not really understand the
EBNF (or rather I distrust it so that I have made little effort to understand
it), and it is impossible to evaluate your changes unless they are phrased as
YACC rules, so we can see if they will fly.

lojbab