Re: [lojban] Lojban CFG Questions

[Robin Lee Powell <rlpowell@digitalkingdom.org>]

On Fri, Dec 10, 2010 at 01:21:21PM -0800, Robin Lee Powell wrote:
> That, in a nutshell, is the elidable terminator problem: making
> terminators act as though they were included when they actually
> weren't, but the sentence parses if they were (and doesn't if they
> weren't).
> 
> You have to solve it *without* significantly changing the
> definition of "sentence" I gave you.

I suddenly have this creepy feeling that there might be a solution
sitting right there.

You have to solve it *without* significantly changing the definition
of "sentence" I gave you *to end up with anything that looks
like the current grammar*.

What if you don't think about it in terms of the current structure
at all, though?

Right now we have something like:

  sentence -> sumti* klama sumti*

  sumti -> "mi" | "lenu" sentence "ku"?

Where * and ? have their usual regex meanings.  We call "ku" an
elidable *terminator*; it terminates the sumti.

What if we called it an elidable *seperator*, and instead did this:

  sentence -> mi-sumti klama | lenu-sumti "ku" klama | mi-sumti le-nu sumti "ku" klama | ...

  mi-sumti -> "mi"
  lenu-sumti -> "lenu" sentence

That is, promote the "ku" one level up.

Would this make it CFG-able?  Could you still end up with something
like Lojban?

I think you *probably* end up with rule explosion and/or something
not at all like current Lojban, but I wanted to throw it out in case
I'm missing something.

-Robin

-- 
http://singinst.org/ :  Our last, best hope for a fantastic future.
Lojban (http://www.lojban.org/): The language in which "this parrot
is dead" is "ti poi spitaki cu morsi", but "this sentence is false"
is "na nei".   My personal page: http://www.digitalkingdom.org/rlp/

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