[lojban] Re: gleki xisri'i

["Cyril Slobin" <cyril@slobin.pp.ru>]

On Fri, Dec 26, 2008 at 4:21 AM, Minimiscience <minimiscience@gmail.com> wrote:

> I interpret that rule as meaning to say "unless a change in meaning results"

You cannot say "change in meaning" before you define the meaning of
terminator-less phrase. If you say "this phrase is meaningless,
because insertion of terminator change is from meaningless to
meaningful", your definition is circular. On the contrary, you example
{nu le broda brode brodi} IS ambiguous, because terminators can be
inserted in at least two ways.

I do NOT suggest to change the language, the current practice is good
enough. But I suggest to find a better way to explain it in a plain
English. "Always shifting" is NOT a plain English: LALR(1) is just one
of many parsing methods, and the language definition should not be
formulated in it's terms.

Consider another, the most famous shift-reduce conflict: the "dangling
else" case. Neither Wirth nor Kernighan and Ritchie said "always
reduce", they said "else is associated with closest previous else-less
if". What I suggest is to find and explicitly write the similar rule
for Lojban. Or to create a really unambiguous grammar, making such an
additional rules unnecessary. BTW, for dangling else it is technically
almost trivial, but the resulting grammar seems unnatural for human
readers.

-- 
http://slobin.pp.ru/ `When I use a word,' Humpty Dumpty said,
<cyril@slobin.pp.ru> `it means just what I choose it to mean'


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