[lojban] Re: Official parser and "lo ni'a zu crino"

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

On Fri, Apr 09, 2004 at 01:10:24AM -0400, jcowan@reutershealth.com wrote:
> But I am okay with accepting things like "le broda joi le brodi",
> since that is not truly an ambiguity but just the result of smarter
> resolution of elidable terminators than Yacc allows.

To clarify this statement: as the elidable terminators have *never* been
formalized, arguing that a change that consists only of smarter
"insertion"[1] of elidable terminators is a change makes no sense.  A
change to what, exactly?  The official parser?  Sure, but the official
parser was never the baseline: grammar.300 is the baseline, and
grammar.300 doesn't even come *close* to formalizing the elidable
terminators.

> I'll also do whatever I'm able to make an actual PEG parser available,
> with the same kinds of features (at least) that the official parser
> supports.

*YAY*!  (Seriously, the more work someone else can do, the better).

> > Given what we know, the bug must be the tense lexer which somehow is
> > not accepting ni'a zu as a valid string.  I never looked at the
> > lexer internals so I can't debug it.
> 
> Checking the source of lexruleo.c shows that the space-before-time
> option was never put in.  Here's a patch for Robin's benefit:
> 
> In the function tense_C_979, add the line "TRY(tense_C_979_4);" just
> after "TRY(tense_C_979_1);".  This makes the order time-space, time,
> space-time, space.
> 
> Then add a new function tense_C_979_4, which is a copy of
> tense_C_979_3 except that the two CALL lines are in reverse order.

Excellent.  Thanks.  (and a line to lexrules.h)

-Robin

[1]: My grammar doesn't "insert" anything, as it has no pre-processor;
it simply treats elidable terminators as optional.  Longest-match and
preferrential ordering do the rest.

-- 
http://www.digitalkingdom.org/~rlpowell/  ***  I'm a *male* Robin.
"Many philosophical problems are caused by such things as the simple
inability to shut up." -- David Stove, liberally paraphrased.
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