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 10:28:36PM -0400, Jonathan Gibbons wrote:
> On 7/12/06, Robin Lee Powell <rlpowell@digitalkingdom.org> wrote:
> 
> >> Probably because the alternative can be very unintuitive.
> 
> [snip]
> 
> >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.
> 
> It'd look exactly like the grammar to handle it now would if you
> replaced all of the "//" pairs with "[]", in the notation of
> bnf.300, and there'd be a seperate mechanism, that by a formalism
> such as associating an ordering and grouping with each rule,
> defines a particular semantic meaning to associate with the
> string. 

OK, see, once you have a seperate formalism for the semantics and
the parsing, I'm no longer interested.  The parser should return
complete information about how the sentence parses, period.

If you're just going to overlay an ad hoc "formalism" on top of CFGs
to get what you want, how is that better than what we have now?

[snip; yes I know what the example term grammar looks like]
> Now, that's very ambiguous, so we disambiguate by defining that
> rules (1) (2) and (3) are left-grouping, and imposing a precedence
> order of (1) (2) (3) (4), such that (1) binds first, i.e.
> preferentially matches the most, and (4) binds last, which is to
> say, the least.

See, this is my point; you're waving your hands and saying that
these rules exist, but not how to define them.  This implies to me
that they exist outside of the CFG.  Replacing CFG + adhocracy with
different CFG + different adhocracy doesn't make anything better, at
all.

-Robin

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