From cowan@ccil.org Wed Mar 17 19:14:23 2004 Return-Path: X-Sender: cowan@ccil.org X-Apparently-To: lojban@yahoogroups.com Received: (qmail 7547 invoked from network); 18 Mar 2004 03:14:20 -0000 Received: from unknown (66.218.66.218) by m9.grp.scd.yahoo.com with QMQP; 18 Mar 2004 03:14:20 -0000 Received: from unknown (HELO mercury.ccil.org) (192.190.237.100) by mta3.grp.scd.yahoo.com with SMTP; 18 Mar 2004 03:14:22 -0000 Received: from cowan by mercury.ccil.org with local (Exim 3.35 #1 (Debian)) id 1B3nye-0006dD-00; Wed, 17 Mar 2004 22:13:48 -0500 Date: Wed, 17 Mar 2004 22:13:45 -0500 To: rlpowell@digitalkingdom.org Cc: lojban@yahoogroups.com Message-ID: <20040318031344.GF12076@ccil.org> References: <20040317222428.GZ11847@digitalkingdom.org> <20040318011211.GH11847@digitalkingdom.org> <20040318012328.GI11847@digitalkingdom.org> <20040318013409.GB12076@ccil.org> <20040318013958.GK11847@digitalkingdom.org> <20040318020848.GO11847@digitalkingdom.org> Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Disposition: inline In-Reply-To: <20040318020848.GO11847@digitalkingdom.org> User-Agent: Mutt/1.3.28i X-eGroups-Remote-IP: 192.190.237.100 From: John Cowan Subject: Re: [lojban] Re: Official parser problem? X-Yahoo-Group-Post: member; u=212516 X-Yahoo-Profile: johnwcowan X-Yahoo-Message-Num: 21718 Robin Lee Powell scripsit: > John is saying one of two things: > > 1. You are wrong in your reading of the grammar. That sentence > definately fails because [explanation]. That's the idea. A parser that gets this wrong is wrong, as the language is currently specified. > 2. You are wrong in your reading of the grammar. That sentence > definately fails because [explanation]. This is a good thing. I hadn't gotten that far. I agree that it's damned unintuitive -- people internalize the grammar of "si" based on words, not tokens. I don't know if you were there when I kept trying to quote something with zo, and kept saying zoi -- this is a disaster in the current language. "zoi si" doesn't work: you need to complete the zoi-quote and then use "si si si si" to remove its four tokens (zoi_627, any_word_698, anything_699, any_word_698). Anything less than four "si"s and your sentence is incurably ungrammatical; of course, it does not matter how many words appear to be inside the quote. I ended up saying "zoi si. sy .si si si si si" just to scrub a single "zoi". Do that more than once, and you turn into Foghorn Leghorn. > It may be that John was just describing the current reality, and not > assigning a value judgement at all, in which case I hope he will accept > my apology for freaking out. No problem. The current situation is at least consistent even if stupid. I'd be open to other ideas that would be less so. -- With techies, I've generally found John Cowan If your arguments lose the first round http://www.reutershealth.com Make it rhyme, make it scan http://www.ccil.org/~cowan Then you generally can jcowan@reutershealth.com Make the same stupid point seem profound! --Jonathan Robie