Re: [lojban] Lojban CFG Questions

["Bob LeChevalier, President and Founder - LLG" <lojbab@lojban.org>]

Roman Naumann wrote:
> However, i realized just now looking at the EBFN [2] causes eye cancer. Also, 
> i've never been good with lojban at all. I don't get the (formalizing) problem 
> with elidable terminators yet. To get started, it would be extremely helpful 
> to work on an abstraction. I'd be glad if you could provide such to me. To 
> give you an idea what kind of abstraction i have in mind, here's an example 
> (though perhaps not very useful):
>
> We have five kinds (sub)sentences. They start and terminate with 'a', 'b', 'c', 
> 'd', 'e'. Inside a (sub)sentence, only subsentences with a letter later in 
> alphabet may stand. ("a c c a" is thus valid, "b a a b" is invalid [whitespace 
> ignored], as a..a is no valid subsentence of b..b).
> Inside of sentences may (beside any number of subsentences) stand zero or more 
> of numbers (which are our abstraction of words). Each number starts with zero 
> and may not contain further zeros (this is to spare us the necessity for 
> whitespace). Terminators [a-e] may be elided, if directly followed by another 
> terminator. Thus, a implicitly terminates [b-e] subsentences, b implicitly 
> terminates [c-e] subsentences and so on.
> A valid example 'word' of the language is: "a 01 02 c 0 e c 08 04 a"
> It should parse to: """ a(01 02 c(0 e())c 08 04)a """
> (didn't want to draw a parse tree, but it this this is enough to get the 
> point)
>
> So, do you think this abstraction catches the elidable terminator problem or 
> is it too simple? If it's too simple, why, what's missing?
> Besides elidable terminators, are there other problems why you think lojban 
> can't be expressed as a CFG (without the grammar being way too large)?

I don't know the answer to your questions, but the guy who developed the 
 elidable terminator formalization, Jeff Prothero (aka Cynbe) is still 
out there, though not actively involved in Lojban these days, and he was 
always good at explaining the theory stuff to me when I was 
clueless-but-trying-to-develop-the-YACC-grammar-anyway.

http://cynbe.us/~cynbe/resume.html
has what I think is his current email

lojbab
--
Bob LeChevalier    lojbab@lojban.org    www.lojban.org
President and Founder, The Logical Language Group, Inc.

--
You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "lojban" group.
To post to this group, send email to lojban@googlegroups.com.
To unsubscribe from this group, send email to lojban+unsubscribe@googlegroups.com.
For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/lojban?hl=en.