Re: [lojban] Re: other parsable languages

[Robin Lee Powell <rlpowell@digitalkingdom.org>]

On Fri, Sep 30, 2005 at 05:00:33PM -0300, Jorge Llamb?as wrote:
> On 9/30/05, Robin Lee Powell <rlpowell@digitalkingdom.org> wrote:
> 
> > Not "so difficult as to be intractable" but "generally believed
> > to be impossible".
> >
> > http://teddyb.org/~rlpowell/hobbies/lojban/grammar/index.html
> >
> > Look for "Old Approach" at the bottom for an explication.
> 
> I may be missing something, but there you only say that dealing
> with terminators in BNF would require a 20-fold expansion of the
> grammar, which may be difficult but not impossible, not even
> intractable.

*IF* it's possible.  I'm going to update that actually; I have
become less sure about it, and if it was possible I'm pretty sure it
would be more than a factor of 20.

If you think you can do it, though, by all means.

> What about the PEG grammar, why is that not a complete grammar?

I didn't say there was no complete grammar for Lojban; I said there
was no complete *YACC* grammar.  The full PEG grammar is, in fact,
complete.

> Because of ZOI? 

Erm, right; complete except for ZOI, which requires a bit of actual
raw code, but it's *such* simple code that in barely counts.

> If so, isn't Lojban minus ZOI (which is really a way of
> introducing non-Lojban into Lojban) completely parsable?

Well, there both completely parseable, it's just a matter of whether
a formal grammar exists.  To answer the question you were actually
asking, though: Yes, Lojban-ZOI has a complete, no exceptions PEG
grammar.

-Robin

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