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To: lojban-list@lojban.org
Subject: [lojban] Re: y: what is it good for?
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Robin Lee Powell wrote:
>*Every* erasure word requires heaps of grammatical wrangling; talking
>about "the erasure system" as a unified whole just makes no sense to me
>at this point.  Each erasure word is handled *utterly* differently.

Ah, interesting.  I haven't delved into any of the parsers yet.

I spoke of "the erasure system" from the point of view of a speaker
of the language, to whom they do appear unified.  Any way I'd write a
Lojban parser would also share a lot of structure.

Not wishing to get your hopes up unreasonably, but I think I can improve
on all your current parsers, in this and other areas.  I'm quite good
with machine grammars and parsers.  I've witnessed the problems you've
had from trying to bend yacc to the task, and I'm not surprised you've
had difficulty, it's simply not up to the task.  Attempts so far also
don't seem to have made the preprocessing stages sufficiently distinct
from the primary parsing.  It's difficult to get that sort of thing
right in a complicated parser, especially the first time round.

-zefram