[lojban-beginners] Re: RK-like diagramming: Anyone interested?

["Jonathan Gibbons" <jonored@gmail.com>]

> A map, that's an interesting way of putting it.
>
> By any chance were you ever a Pascal programmer? To me, the
> "railroad" notation was the simplest, clearest description
> of language syntax I ever saw. Examples in the classic Wirth
> books and so on.

An interesting setup; I'd rather have more of a place for labelling
the nonterminals (in that form, they seem to mostly be either separate
tables, or just contiguous sets of lines.), as they do carry meaning;
they show semantic groupings as well as syntactic ones, rather than
just being a step in determining if a sentence is valid or not.

> The real status of that grammar is something interesting to me, but
> I'm not a "real" grammar/parser guy.
>
> Refer to Robin Powell's page:
> http://www.digitalkingdom.org/~rlpowell/hobbies/lojban/grammar/
>
> I don't know how up-to-date it is -- I assume this stuff doesn't
> change as fast as we'd like.

That whole section of debate confuses me greatly; mostly because I do
not see the problem at all. Most of the problems seem to go away when
you impose a priority on the rules, which all of the parsers I have
encountered do, certainly all the generalised LR parsers. It'd
certainly be less important if Lojban were LALR-parsable, but it
doesn't seem to me like it ought to be a big deal...

Although there is the example of

>  "le nu broda ku brode" and "le nu broda kei brode" are grammatical,
>  but "le nu broda brode", eliding both terminators, is not.

from the discussion, that leads me to ask; is a statement that
consists of just a sumti, with no selbri, grammatical or
ungrammatical? as that's what I would see leading to the second being
ungrammatical - I had already expressed what happens when there is no
terminator in terms of priorties.