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Re: [lojban] Instant Evaluation (was: The Knights who forgot to say "ni!"



At 02:06 PM 9/4/01 +0000, Jorge Llambias wrote:

la xod cusku di'e

>Lazy evaluation makes lu'e a lot more useful. It converts {lu'e la djan}
>from "John" to "The Symbol for John".

I wouldn't have a problem with {lu'e la djan} being defined
as {le du'u makau du la djan}, "who John is" but please, please,
pretty please, don't call it "The Symbol for John" then! It is
exactly the same confusion as calling the proposition "whether p"
"The Truth Value of p", or calling the proposition "how
much p" "The Amount of p". In English we can easily get away
with those word games, but in Lojban it only creates confusion.
Truth values, amounts or symbols are not really propositions.

The concept I had of la'e and lu'e was similar to the concept of pointer variables in programming. lu'e then is a variable reference that points to the referent, and la'e takes the variable reference and treats it as a pointer to another referent. The two are inverse operations.

lojbab
--
lojbab                                             lojbab@lojban.org
Bob LeChevalier, President, The Logical Language Group, Inc.
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Artificial language Loglan/Lojban:                 http://www.lojban.org