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[lojban-beginners] The /.../ operator in the Lojban EBNF grammar
- To: lojban-beginners@lojban.org
- Subject: [lojban-beginners] The /.../ operator in the Lojban EBNF grammar
- From: Joshua Choi <joshua@choi.name>
- Date: Thu, 3 Dec 2009 21:59:10 -0700
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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. Does it have a
consistent syntactic meaning across the grammar, or is it really case-
by-case? Can it be converted into a more standard EBNF syntax?