From nobody@digitalkingdom.org Wed Jul 12 08:04:28 2006 Received: with ECARTIS (v1.0.0; list lojban-list); Wed, 12 Jul 2006 08:04:41 -0700 (PDT) Received: from nobody by chain.digitalkingdom.org with local (Exim 4.62) (envelope-from ) id 1G0gFp-0008UP-P1 for lojban-list-real@lojban.org; Wed, 12 Jul 2006 08:03:59 -0700 Received: from ug-out-1314.google.com ([66.249.92.170]) by chain.digitalkingdom.org with esmtp (Exim 4.62) (envelope-from ) id 1G0gFj-0008UG-Me for lojban-list@lojban.org; Wed, 12 Jul 2006 08:03:55 -0700 Received: by ug-out-1314.google.com with SMTP id y2so247839uge for ; Wed, 12 Jul 2006 08:03:50 -0700 (PDT) DomainKey-Signature: a=rsa-sha1; q=dns; c=nofws; s=beta; d=gmail.com; h=received:message-id:date:from:to:subject:in-reply-to:mime-version:content-type:content-transfer-encoding:content-disposition:references; b=gX7Dh+0cHZLY2E6TH5Pl9xJvTXjvEtuUL2zA35/hKmUJA/+7NuJYjbLmYhEx44iJcRfpihOw0g5B2Q34hFs0UdRHSx+xFy50siL45WAjAkqzQwBFifQZBXSy1UqAjngLn/bb3W7g0SMOauzSckYbMOMyYhkp8q2NynD8/Emwvfg= Received: by 10.67.29.12 with SMTP id g12mr849805ugj; Wed, 12 Jul 2006 08:03:50 -0700 (PDT) Received: by 10.67.30.12 with HTTP; Wed, 12 Jul 2006 08:03:50 -0700 (PDT) Message-ID: Date: Wed, 12 Jul 2006 11:03:50 -0400 From: "Jonathan Gibbons" To: lojban-list@lojban.org Subject: [lojban] Re: Is Lojban a CFG? (was Re: [lojban-beginners] Re: Enumerating in Lojban) In-Reply-To: <925d17560607120611r6cff869bw3d732846112bf96a@mail.gmail.com> MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1; format=flowed Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Content-Disposition: inline References: <925d17560607120611r6cff869bw3d732846112bf96a@mail.gmail.com> X-Spam-Score: -2.3 (--) X-archive-position: 12149 X-ecartis-version: Ecartis v1.0.0 Sender: lojban-list-bounce@lojban.org Errors-to: lojban-list-bounce@lojban.org X-original-sender: jonored@gmail.com Precedence: bulk Reply-to: lojban-list@lojban.org X-list: lojban-list > Probably because the alternative can be very unintuitive. Our impulse with handling unintuitive strings differs, then; my impulse is that they be noted to be unintuitive, and therefore bad style in communication involving humans, throwing up a nice big red flag saying "humans, this probably doesn't mean what you think it means", and leave it formally in the language; I'd rather have statements that are unintuitive than a language that is so tantalizingly close, but not quite, context-free. It'd only apply to those areas that are not currently in lojban, so it doesn't seem to me that anything would be lost. I've yet to meet a programmer, at least, who when faced with uncertainty about which way an expression will parse, doesn't just insert parens to force it to be the way they want; that's what I had envisioned elidable terminators doing; providing a quick and straightforward method of forcing a string to parse in the way you meant, not the way it would be without the terminator. > Wouldn't left-grouping give you: > > (le (nu (le broda) brode) brodi) > You are in all probability correct; I was assuming the existence of something to force the fragment "le broda brode" into being "le (broda brode)", because that was the behavior I remember being told of when the terminator was elided. That's what I get for posting at 0300... and why I check homeworks after sleep if I'm doing work late/early. It's also, of course, not neccessarily the best grouping to use; I was just pulling up an example that would disambiguate all of the terminator-less strings, not make them behave in sensible manner to humans. So basically, what I'm thinking, is let the formal language keep those statements, let the formal parsers parse them, and avoid using them because they're unintuitive. That also would be the behavior I would prefer for something serving the function of jbofi'e - it'd misunderstand, which would point me to the need to change the string to force it to parse the way I meant, rather than just saying "That's not lojban." Not saying that humans should use these statements, just that a decider for membership in lojban should accept them. Adjusting the definition in such a manner puts that decider into one of the most studied and understood classes of deciders in existence, rather than an ad-hoc or less well-explored decider. -Jonathan To unsubscribe from this list, send mail to lojban-list-request@lojban.org with the subject unsubscribe, or go to http://www.lojban.org/lsg2/, or if you're really stuck, send mail to secretary@lojban.org for help.