[lojban] Re: erasure words

[Zefram <lojban-out@lojban.org>]

Robin Lee Powell wrote:
>I completely understand that.  There is no valid way to handle something
>when all I know is that it erases *something*.

Yes.  That's half of my point.  The other half is that there *are*
valid ways to handle something when all you know is that it *doesn't*
erase anything.  I'm not sure quite how much one can do in this case;
it's not a lot, but you can at least, in theory, allow the erroneous
word to be erased.

In the example "le broda cei'au si brode", if one knows for certain
that "cei'au" is not an eraser then one can confidently preprocess to
"le broda brode".

>       Despite all of this discussion, the language is *not* actually
>open for change.

My understanding is that the language may be added to in the future,
albeit at a slow pace, and that this is what the extended cmavo space is
for.  Am I right here?  I, too, wish to preserve the stability of Lojban.

For clarity: I mentally divide language discussions here into a handful
of categories:

* working out what the current language definition really means (e.g.,
  the "zo fu bu" debate)

* artifacts of the current implementations that we might want to define
  differently (e.g., "zei" at the beginning of text)

* possible future additions to the language (any proposed new cmavo)

* tricky parts of the language that we could have done differently
  ("zoi si")

The borders between these categories are fuzzy in some cases, and some
conversations have aspects of more than one category.  My understanding
is that only the last of these four categories is really problematic,
because it is only in that category that the language definition is being
contradicted so as to invalidate existing usages.  Anything in the third
category can't become official in the near future, but doesn't actually
cause a problem.  Is this a good view of things?

I'm personally very clear on the distinction between what a particular
parser implements and the official language.  These parsers are, among
other uses, testbeds for experimental variations of the language.

Something I might have missed so far: is there a taboo here against
discussing possible language changes due to fear of rehashing the
(extensive) language design work?  Perhaps I have been insufficiently
conservative, for which I apologise.

>1.  I'm already doing it, so I'm not sure what the point is, although I
>would *love* someone to look over my PEG grammar.

I'd like to.  I've never seen PEG before.

>2.  I honestly don't think that you understand how hard a problem Lojban
>grammar is to implement.

Fair enough.  It's certainly going to be a challenge.  We'll see how it
turns out.

-zefram