Re: [lojban] Re: Is Lojban a CFG? (was Re: [lojban-beginners] Re: Enumerating in Lojban)

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

On Wed, Jul 12, 2006 at 10:11:52AM -0300, Jorge Llamb?as wrote:
> On 7/12/06, Jonathan Gibbons <jonored@gmail.com> wrote:
> >why not just state "Lojban is left-grouping by default" to
> >disambiguate the whole set of these statements, rather than
> >deciding "that's not Lojban"? (left-grouping being the same
> >concept as leftmost-derivation) 
[snip]
> >I'm really wondering why that design decision was made. I'll
> >probably quiet down about it soon, though.
> 
> Probably because the alternative can be very unintuitive. Another
> example:
> 
>  li pa pa pa pa moi
> 
> That's ungrammatical, but
> 
>  li pa pa pa boi pa moi
> 
> is grammatical. I think breaking a string of digits by some
> precedence rule would be unintuitive.

Jonathan, I'd like to see an example of a CFG that would handle
the above by any rule at all.  Just out of curiousity.

I find the general idea interesting; I'm going to have to ponder it
a bit.  I think, though, that most people would rather the parser
reject a sentence like:

le nu le gleki prenu klama cinri

rather than turn it into the equivalent of:

le nu le gleki ku prenu ku klama cinri

when the user obviously intended:

le nu le gleki prenu ku klama ku cinri

This (the current behaviour) seems to me to reduce the chances for
confusion *substantially*.  But then I haven't thought about it much
yet.

-Robin

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