[lojban] Re: mimiklama

[Robin Lee Powell <lojban-out@lojban.org>]

On Thu, Mar 18, 2004 at 08:04:51AM -0500, John Cowan wrote:
> Philip Newton scripsit:
>  
> > I thought you could add any number of cmavo to the beginning of any
> > brivla since the beginning of the brivla was unambiguously defined
> > by the consonant cluster? So for me {mimiklama} = {mi mi klama} (and
> > {mimikla} would be {mi mikla} with an unknown gismu *mikla).
>  
> Correct.  Spaces are totally optional in Lojban if stress information
> is available:  

That was my point: I wasn't indicating stress.

> IMHO the Right Thing is to change all whitespace to dots to begin
> with, and then work entirely with letters, stress, and pause, which
> are the terms in which Nora's pseudocode is written anyway.

<nod>

> Just to document what the O.P. does: it checks each whitespace/dot
> delimited word as follows:
>  
> 	if it ends in a consonant, CMENE;
> 	if it contains CC (ignoring all instances of "y" and "'"), BRIVLA;
> 	if it contains CC (ignoring all instances of "y" and "'"), BRIVLA;
> 	otherwise, split into cmavo before each consonant.

That's very, very similar to how mine handles things.

> This handles canonically written Lojban, except that "byfy" will be
> misparsed as BRIVLA.  (The rules for when "." may be omitted after BY
> are a wart anyhow.)

'a wart'?  (I don't recognize the expression.)

> Just to give (geeky) people an idea of how old the O.P. is:
> 
> It was originally developed on a PC AT with a 10 MB hard disk and a
> '286 chip running Microsoft Xenix (a Unix System III variant), 

That last part is what blows my mind, not the PC AT.

> with version 5 of the Microsoft C compiler for Xenix, which had a
> cross-compilation mode for DOS.  

Damn, dude.

> And it was written at a time when I had not yet decided to adopt
> function prototypes, because I was concerned about lack of portability
> to other Unix systems, whose pcc-based C compilers didn't yet support
> them.

Aaaaaah!  I had been wondering about that.  It makes the code freak me
out.

-Robin

-- 
Me: http://www.digitalkingdom.org/~rlpowell/  ***   I'm a *male* Robin.
"Constant neocortex override is the only thing that stops us all
from running out and eating all the cookies."  -- Eliezer Yudkowsky
http://www.lojban.org/             ***              .i cimo'o prali .ui