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Re: [bpfk] Re: {.i} and {ni'o}, continuation or new jufra
Long, long conversation here.
What follows is a proposal, not a description of the current state of affairs. i believe that it is backwards compatible with most uses, although possibly not all edge cases.
A "text" is everything produced by the current rule named "text" in the formal grammar. This is a single chunk of input, and can be fed to a parser by itself. It has an elidible terminator ({fa'u}) to explicitly indicate where it ends. It also has a new initiator to explicitly mark the beginning of parseable text. I'll use {fa'ai}, mnemonic {cfari}, but I don't care what word it is. In the end, it may end up analyzed out, but for now it's helpful to have it. {fa'ai} is of its own selma'o.
A "conversation" is a sequence of zero or more texts, optionally with non-lojban garbage between them.
There is also a new continuation word (tentatively {di'ai}, since that's what was used earlier) of its own selma'o. if it occurs at the beginning of a text (after optional {fa'ai}), we treat the text as a continuation of the preceding text (ignoring everything between them).
"conversation" is the new top-level rule in the parser. it gracefully degrades to just a single text.
So given an exchange in IRC
A: do klama ma
B: lo zarci
We can either parse each line completely independently, or we can make our logs in a parseable format thus:
A: fa'ai do klama ma fa'o
B: fa'ai lo zarci fa'o
That entire block is a single lojban conversation, and can be parsed.
Potential issues:
The conversation rule should ignore leading garbage before the first {fa'ai}, but {fa'ai} should be optional. This may mean that we misparse text or parse what we shouldn't, only to throw it away. I don't know whether that's workable or not, but it seems similar to issues {su} has.
This view holds with the idea that continuations are always explicit. If you want a new text to be treated as part of an old text, start it with {di'ai}. If you want to be explicit that it is *not* part of the preceding text, {fa'ai} will do that. Otherwise, it will implicitly be a new text, but if context is strong enough people may ignore that for practical reasons.
How these work with other Magic Words is left as an exercise for someone else, for now.
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