[lojban] Re: Is Lojban a CFG? (was Re: [lojban-beginners] Re: Enumerating in Lojban)

["Jorge Llambías" <lojban-out@lojban.org>]

On 7/12/06, Jonathan Gibbons <jonored@gmail.com> wrote:
> To be far too annoying, given
>
> > le nu le broda brode brodi
>
> why not just state "Lojban is left-grouping by default" to
> disambiguate the whole set of these statements, rather than deciding
> "that's not Lojban"? (left-grouping being the same concept as
> leftmost-derivation) I can't think of any situation that wouldn't be
> disambiguated by that... the above would group as
> "(le (nu (le (broda brode)) brodi))",
> and there'd be a simple rule to tell what the grouping should be.

Wouldn't left-grouping give you:

(le (nu (le broda) brode) brodi)

?

> I'm really wondering why that design decision was made. I'll probably
> quiet down about it soon, though.

Probably because the alternative can be very unintuitive.
Another example:

 li pa pa pa pa moi

That's ungrammatical, but

 li pa pa pa boi pa moi

is grammatical. I think breaking a string of digits by some precedence rule
would be unintuitive.

mu'o mi'e xorxes


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