Re: [bpfk] BPFK work

[Jorge Llambías <jjllambias@gmail.com>]

On Mon, Oct 11, 2010 at 2:28 PM, Robert LeChevalier <lojbab@lojban.org> wrote:
> 3. The formalization of the machine grammar has not to my knowledge ever
> been fully implemented,

It has for several years now. It hasn't yet been made official, but it
has been formalized, the whole thing, from the morphology up,
including all the tricky magic words.

There are some issues still to decide, but not because they haven't
been formalized, only because we have to make choices as to which
formal version of a rule is preferrable. (I'm thinking of the various
possibilities for SA here, and different options for the details of
long consonant or vowel clusters in the phonotactics of cmevla and
fu'ivla.)

> and the fact that we are having this discussion
> indicates that the concept of "text" was never formally defined in terms
> necessary to account for multiple speakers.

That's a pragmatic matter, external to the formal grammar, right.

> In the formal grammar, "text"
> is everything up until a fa'o (which almost no one uses - except apparently
> in Twitter),

It is also often used as a sort of "The End" for stories, for example
at the end of "Alice in Wonderland".

> and thus it is arbitrary to say that change of speaker ends a
> text.

It is arbitrary, yes, and it has always been the usual practice, both
in teaching materials and in actual use for example in IRC. It's easy
to finds loads of examples.

> By the formal language, no fa'o: no end of text.

That's not quite right.

 In PEG, FAhO is optional, otherwise the end of input is enough to
signal the end of text.

In BNF the rule for FAhO is only given informally, it is not a part of
the formalization:
"FAhO is a universal terminator and signals the end of parsable input."

In YACC it is also only given as part of the pre-parsing shenanigans,
and it is only optional. In the YACC document it is mentioned three
times:
"If the text contains a FAhO, treat that as the end-of-text and ignore
everything that follows it."
%token FAhO_529         /* normally elided ’done pause’ to indicate end
                                   of utterance string */
  /* An empty text is legal; formerly this was handled by the explicit
   appearance of FAhO_529, but this is now absorbed by the preparser. */


> By the formal grammar, if there is no fa'o, there is no new text. Indeed, by
> the formal grammar, there is no concept of more than one text and after a
> fa'o, everything else until the end of time is non-Lojban. %^)

That's absurd. By the formal grammar, each input that parses correctly
is a valid Lojban text. There's no reason to think that only one valid
Lojban text exists in all the universe.

>> Why? Why wouldn't the computer just parse each speaker's text on its
>> own?
>
> The computer doesn't know what a "speaker" is.

Computers nowadays are pretty good at voice recognition.

> It knows what a text-stream
> is, and that such a text-stream ends with a fa'o and only with a fa'o.

You can program a computer to recognize different speakers and feed
the contribution from each speaker to the parser as a separate input.
That of course has nothing to do with the formal grammar.

>  Actual implementation is thus erroneous in that it can end other than with
> a fa'o (i.e with whatever the computer system recognizes as "end-of-text".

"fa'o" has never been an obligatory end of text indicator, as far as I can tell.

>> A: do klama ma
>> B: lo zarci
>
> "Formally", to the Lojbanic computer, that is "do klama ma lo zarci". It
> doesn't know what "A:" and "B:" are.  "Formally", to the Lojbanic computer
> there is no possibility of more than one text.

Absurd.

mu'o mi'e xorxes

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