Re: [bpfk] Can we drop the fore tanru cmavo?

[Jorge Llambías <jjllambias@gmail.com>]

On Fri, Dec 23, 2011 at 9:18 PM, John Cowan <cowan@mercury.ccil.org> wrote:
>
> Well, yes, but zei, bu, mei are handled by the pre-YACC portion of the
> official parser, so they aren't going to be easy to understand in complex
> cases.  (In hindsight, we should have made MEI a prefix as gua\spi does.)

I'm not sure about that "so" there. I don't think being handled by the
YACC or the non-YACC portion of the parser is that much correlated
with ease of understanding.

Also, consider:

(1) mi prami ko'a .e ko'e .e ko'i .e ko'o .e ko'u .e fo'a .e fo'e .e
fo'i .e fo'o na.e fo'u

You don't need more than one word lookahead for (syntactic) parsing of
that, but you don't achieve (semantic) understanding until you reach
the end. Compare with its forethought version:

(2)  mi prami ge nai ge ge ge ge ge ge ge ge ko'a gi ko'e gi ko'i gi
ko'o gi ko'u gi fo'a gi fo'e gi fo'i gi fo'o gi fo'u

(1) is easy to produce, and not too hard to understand. (2) is hard to
produce (it's easy to lose count of the "ge"s) and probably even
harder to understand. Yet the one that requires long lookahead (for
semantic understanding) is (1), not (2).

So I have to dispute the assumption that the one-word lookahead
restriction on the YACC portion of the official parser has any
relevance to the ease or difficulty of human processing of the
language.

mu'o mi'e xorxes

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