Date: Fri, 4 Dec 2009 09:29:27 -0800
From: Robin Lee Powell <rlpowell@digitalkingdom.org>
To: lojban-beginners@lojban.org
Subject: [lojban-beginners] Re: The /.../ operator in the Lojban EBNF grammar
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On Thu, Dec 03, 2009 at 09:59:10PM -0700, Joshua Choi wrote:
> I'm perusing the Lojban EBNF grammar. I know little about YACC but
> do understand EBNF—at least, standard EBNFs, and I'd like to try
> whipping up a Lojban parser in the future. I'm puzzling over the
> usage of /.../, which is defined to enclose "an elidable
> terminator, which may be omitted (without change of meaning) if no
> grammatical ambiguity results." What does that really mean? I
> understand what it indicates superficially, but, rigorously, it's
> pretty vague. 

John Cowan knows the proper formal definition; I can never remember.
It's something like "An elidable terminator can be remove if doing
so does not cause the number of possible productions to increase."

> Does it have a consistent syntactic meaning across the grammar, or
> is it really case-by-case? 

It is consisntent.

> Can it be converted into a more standard EBNF syntax?

If you can figure out how, there's $500 in it for you.
http://www.mail-archive.com/lojban-beginners@lojban.org/msg04333.html

-Robin

-- 
They say:  "The first AIs will be built by the military as weapons."
And I'm  thinking:  "Does it even occur to you to try for something
other  than  the default  outcome?"  See http://shrunklink.com/cdiz
http://www.digitalkingdom.org/~rlpowell/ *** http://www.lojban.org/