[lojban] Re: Just Bizarre (offical parser stuff)

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

On Tue, Mar 30, 2004 at 10:37:03AM -0500, Bob LeChevalier wrote:
> At 07:25 PM 3/29/04 -0800, Robin Lee Powell wrote:
> >$ echo "mi troci le nu bapli le za'i le kagni poi ponse le skami pe
> >la duramater ku ku ku le nu cpacu la paitn" | parser
> >3;0;00moi ke lojbo genturfa'i
> >Copyright 1991,1992,1993 The Logical Languages Group, Inc.  All Rights
> >Reserved
> >(mi {troci <[(le {nu <bapli VAU> KEI} ku) (le {nu <cpacu [(la paitn) VAU]> 
> >KEI} KU)] VAU>})
> >
> >
> >That's just *wierd*.  It ate like 80% of the sentence without a
> >trace.
> 
> I don't know why the stuff disappeared, but the sentence is
> ungrammatical (and the YACC parser has never been good at telling
> people why something is bad - it just tries to recover; the 2.33
> parser was somewhat more robust at this than the 3.0 parser, as I
> recall). 

Just for the record, I care very little that it ate a bunch of stuff or
that it's bad at error handling or whatever.

What I care about, a lot, is that it responded to an ungrammatical
sentence by returning a return value that indicated a successful parse.
This makes it hard to do automated testing, because at any time the
official parser could be generating a false positive.

-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