From lojban-out@lojban.org Thu May 13 14:48:36 2004 Return-Path: X-Sender: lojban-out@lojban.org X-Apparently-To: lojban@yahoogroups.com Received: (qmail 46967 invoked from network); 13 May 2004 21:48:36 -0000 Received: from unknown (66.218.66.167) by m23.grp.scd.yahoo.com with QMQP; 13 May 2004 21:48:36 -0000 Received: from unknown (HELO chain.digitalkingdom.org) (64.81.49.134) by mta6.grp.scd.yahoo.com with SMTP; 13 May 2004 21:48:35 -0000 Received: from lojban-out by chain.digitalkingdom.org with local (Exim 4.32) id 1BOO4A-0001t8-Sp for lojban@yahoogroups.com; Thu, 13 May 2004 14:48:35 -0700 Received: from dsl081-049-134.sfo1.dsl.speakeasy.net ([64.81.49.134] helo=chain.digitalkingdom.org) by chain.digitalkingdom.org with esmtp (Exim 4.32) id 1BOO3W-0001sE-FH; Thu, 13 May 2004 14:47:54 -0700 Received: with ECARTIS (v1.0.0; list lojban-list); Thu, 13 May 2004 14:47:51 -0700 (PDT) Received: from rlpowell by chain.digitalkingdom.org with local (Exim 4.32) id 1BOO3M-0001rz-R3 for lojban-list@lojban.org; Thu, 13 May 2004 14:47:44 -0700 Date: Thu, 13 May 2004 14:47:44 -0700 Message-ID: <20040513214744.GA4461@digitalkingdom.org> Mail-Followup-To: lojban-list@lojban.org References: <20040513213804.GG16333@fysh.org> Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Disposition: inline In-Reply-To: <20040513213804.GG16333@fysh.org> User-Agent: Mutt/1.5.5.1+cvs20040105i X-archive-position: 7810 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 X-list: lojban-list To: lojban@yahoogroups.com X-eGroups-Remote-IP: 64.81.49.134 X-eGroups-From: Robin Lee Powell From: Robin Lee Powell Reply-To: rlpowell@digitalkingdom.org Subject: [lojban] Re: erasure words X-Yahoo-Group-Post: member; u=116389790 X-Yahoo-Profile: lojban_out X-Yahoo-Message-Num: 22273 On Thu, May 13, 2004 at 10:38:04PM +0100, Zefram wrote: > Looking at the "sa" debate, it appears that people have come up with > more than one useful set of semantics for it: No kidding. > * erase up to and including the previous instance of the following > word > > * erase up to and including the previous word of the same selma'o as > the following word That's the official interpretation. > * erase until the next word can legally follow This is obviously untenable. > To which I'd like to add another possibility along the same lines: > > * erase up to and including the previous word that is in the same > category as the following word, using broader categories than selma'o, > so that "le broda sa la broda" preprocesses to "la broda" If you would like to produce a list of selma'o that can be considered equivalent for this purpose, I'd be willing to consider immplementing that. I don't *think* there are any cases where LE and LA are not interchangeable. > And I came to the conclusion that we've got more useful erase > operators than we have words assigned to them. That's what experimental cmavo are for. > Perhaps some of the expanded cmavo space should be earmarked for erase > operators. > > Btw, this earmarking is a protocol engineering technique, and I highly > recommend it. Really? So you think CIDR is bad, then? > If a Lojban parser sees a cmavo that it doesn't know, being able to > tell at least whether it is an erase operator would be *very* helpful. No, it wouldn't. Not in the least. The erase operators are all different selma'o, and are all handled completely independantly. > I also think part of the "sa" debate is happening because people are > trying to define it in a very low-level way, operating on words > without regard for grammar. Such low-level operators are indeed > useful, but they're not sufficient for a good preprocessor. Just for the record, my grammar has no pre-processor, and it uses a grammatical formalism that is more expressive than LR(n), for any n (including infinity). > I'd like to have some higher-level erase operators that parse what has > gone before and act on that. These would be used to correct > higher-level errors: because they require grammatical text they > couldn't fix grammatical errors, but would be useful when the wrong > grammatical text has been said. Operators to think about: > > * erase the sumti currently in progress or just completed > > * erase the bridi currently in progress or just completed Both of these can be done with sa. > * erase back to and including the opening delimiter matched by the > closing delimiter that follows the erase word How is "lu broda SA_LIKE li'u da" == da better than "lu broda sa lu si da" == da? -Robin -- http://www.digitalkingdom.org/~rlpowell/ *** I'm a *male* Robin. "Many philosophical problems are caused by such things as the simple inability to shut up." -- David Stove, liberally paraphrased. http://www.lojban.org/ *** loi pimlu na srana .i ti rokci morsi