From lojban-out@lojban.org Wed Jul 12 18:31:33 2006 Return-Path: X-Sender: lojban-out@lojban.org X-Apparently-To: lojban@yahoogroups.com Received: (qmail 41320 invoked from network); 13 Jul 2006 01:30:28 -0000 Received: from unknown (66.218.66.166) by m22.grp.scd.yahoo.com with QMQP; 13 Jul 2006 01:30:28 -0000 Received: from unknown (HELO chain.digitalkingdom.org) (64.81.49.134) by mta5.grp.scd.yahoo.com with SMTP; 13 Jul 2006 01:30:28 -0000 Received: from lojban-out by chain.digitalkingdom.org with local (Exim 4.62) (envelope-from ) id 1G0pxW-0003TL-Uh for lojban@yahoogroups.com; Wed, 12 Jul 2006 18:25:43 -0700 Received: from chain.digitalkingdom.org ([64.81.49.134]) by chain.digitalkingdom.org with esmtp (Exim 4.62) (envelope-from ) id 1G0pwu-0003SK-4F; Wed, 12 Jul 2006 18:25:05 -0700 Received: with ECARTIS (v1.0.0; list lojban-list); Wed, 12 Jul 2006 18:24:56 -0700 (PDT) Received: from nobody by chain.digitalkingdom.org with local (Exim 4.62) (envelope-from ) id 1G0pwS-0003SB-W1 for lojban-list-real@lojban.org; Wed, 12 Jul 2006 18:24:37 -0700 Received: from ug-out-1314.google.com ([66.249.92.172]) by chain.digitalkingdom.org with esmtp (Exim 4.62) (envelope-from ) id 1G0pwR-0003S4-V1 for lojban-list@lojban.org; Wed, 12 Jul 2006 18:24:36 -0700 Received: by ug-out-1314.google.com with SMTP id e2so82664ugf for ; Wed, 12 Jul 2006 18:24:34 -0700 (PDT) Received: by 10.66.219.11 with SMTP id r11mr71362ugg; Wed, 12 Jul 2006 18:24:34 -0700 (PDT) Received: by 10.67.30.12 with HTTP; Wed, 12 Jul 2006 18:24:34 -0700 (PDT) Message-ID: Date: Wed, 12 Jul 2006 21:24:34 -0400 In-Reply-To: <20060713003616.GD18359@chain.digitalkingdom.org> MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1; format=flowed Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Content-Disposition: inline References: <20060713003616.GD18359@chain.digitalkingdom.org> X-Spam-Score: -2.3 (--) X-archive-position: 12166 X-ecartis-version: Ecartis v1.0.0 Errors-to: lojban-list-bounce@lojban.org X-original-sender: jonored@gmail.com X-list: lojban-list X-Spam-Score: -2.3 (--) To: lojban@yahoogroups.com X-Originating-IP: 64.81.49.134 X-eGroups-Msg-Info: 1:0:0:0 X-eGroups-From: "Jonathan Gibbons" From: "Jonathan Gibbons" Reply-To: jonored@gmail.com Subject: [lojban] Re: Is Lojban a CFG? (was Re: [lojban-beginners] Re: Enumerating in Lojban) X-Yahoo-Group-Post: member; u=116389790; y=XfgXZQe8u8SQxElnhxKmW413z3nWzEU7v8GbaPYYZXhioEP6Hw X-Yahoo-Profile: lojban_out X-Yahoo-Message-Num: 26592 > 1. "Not a CFG" != "not formalizable". Lojban is still formalizable > and easily machine parseable (witness the PEG formalism, for > example). My question being, why build in a constraint that makes it not a CFL, with no significant benefit that I can see, which requires the use of a more powerful formalism, that has been much less explored and has fewer algorithms and a smaller codebase, to describe the language? ("Formalizable" is not exactly saying much about a language; I can formally describe the language consisting of descriptions of turing machine description and input pairs such that the turing machine will halt given the input; on the other hand, it is provably impossible to write a parser for that language, but that's not the main point of your statement.) > 2. Elidable terminators seem to make intuitive sense to humans. Actually, for my part, the aspect of them that I am suggesting being different was very much /not/ intuitive. I expected them to behave in a manner similar to parentheses; if they are there, then they force the meaning to be a particular thing, if they aren't, then the meaning may or may not be as intended, dependent on other rules involved. This confused me for a very long time with the various, as I was making statements that I was not sure if the terminator was neccessary or not, and I expected to have it spit back something that I didn't mean if I was wrong about needing them, and instead nothing/cryptic syntax errors came out; so I spent quite a bit of time trying to figure out what it was, and lack of an elidable terminator was generally the last thing I thought of, because it was unintuitive to me to have a the absence of what I saw as a disambiguation mechanism cause a string to not parse at all. > 3. The lanugage would be *very* unwieldy as a CFG: way to many > syllables would be expended in required required terminators. I'm not suggesting dropping the concept; I'm suggesting making them optional, and defining a rule or two on the semantic side of things to disambiguate what would be ambiguous. As such, human use would be almost exactly the same; it's just that if you elide a terminator where one is not permitted to be elided now, you would possibly be saying something that is not what you intended to say, rather than a decider for the language being required to reject it. Having a decider for the language reject statements that a human would find the meaning of unintuitive does not seem worth dropping being a CFL for. -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.