Re: [lojban] Lojban CFG Questions

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

On Sat, Dec 11, 2010 at 09:44:05AM -0700, .alyn.post. wrote:
> On Sat, Dec 11, 2010 at 08:32:18AM -0800, Robin Lee Powell wrote:
> > On Sat, Dec 11, 2010 at 05:59:38AM -0500, Bob LeChevalier,
> > President and Founder - LLG wrote:
> > > 
> > > I don't know the answer to your questions, but the guy who
> > > developed the  elidable terminator formalization, 
> > 
> > It's not a formalization; that's the whole point here.  The yacc
> > version "handles" them by erroring out and running some code to
> > handle the errors.
> > 
> 
> Do you know what camxes or jbofi'e do in this case?  Is it the
> same behavior?

camxes is PEG; PEG has no problems with the elidable terminators.
AFAIK, jbofihe uses the error trick.

> Why should we not formally define this behavior, introduce a
> /syntax/ for it, and solve the problem from that direction?

Long since been done; see the EBNF linked from
http://www.digitalkingdom.org/~rlpowell/hobbies/lojban/grammar/ (and
the rest of that page)

> What about the situation don't I understand that makes that
> problematic?

No-one knows how to make a CFG that does elidable terminators (or so
I thought; xorxes showed a method I have not evaluated, but it has
combinatorial explosion of rules, which is no better).

CFGs are better understood than PEGs, so as a formalism they are
somewhat preferable.

-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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