Re: [lojban] Magic Words work-in-progress repository

[Jorge Llambías <jjllambias@gmail.com>]

On Fri, Aug 26, 2011 at 9:41 PM, .alyn.post.
<alyn.post@lodockikumazvati.org> wrote:
>
> This case convinced me that we needed precedence rules:
>
>  broda bu zei brode bu

It's easy to come up with somewhat strange results with any set of
rules. The parse you will end up with for "broda zei brode bu" is
arguably just as unintuitive as the parse for the above with strict
LTR.

>  The *essential* property of LTR is preserved
> in this magic words work,

I don't think so, bacause it forces you to learn arbitrary precedence
rules that may make sense in some cases but not in others. If a system
of arbitrary precedences did not have strange cases, it might be worth
the extra effort of learning the arbitrary rules, but if you will have
strange cases in any case, I think it's better to have as simple a
rule as possible.

>but I think the above case demonstrates
> that LTR doesn't make sense in every case: that more complex rules
> result in easier to understand and parse (by humans) texts.

I find that the rule for ZEI that makes it act like BU to the left and
like ZO to the right much easier to understand. ZEI is essentially
like a BU-ZO hybrid, and the (slight, hardly noticeable) difference in
behavior to the left from the behavior to the right is just a
reflection of the fact that BU acts (inevitably) slightly different to
the left than ZO does to the right.

> It is my hope, in preparing this code, that I can change the
> nature of that debate from discussing individual cases and ideas
> around Magic Words to "there is a bug on line 100, here is a patch,
> and here is the list of test cases that changed and as well the
> justification for why those changes are valid."

OK, but I probably won't be spending time checking code so that it
does perfectly well something that I feel is essentially wrong. So at
this point I can only argue against your starting point.

> I believe that it
> is too easy, in discussing this topic, to focus on what we want out
> of a single case without realizing the repercussions that has for
> the remaining body of this work.

Indeed. But are you not doing just that with the "broda bu zei brode bu" case?

If you truly want an intuitively fully symmetric ZEI, then you would
have to only allow the same type of thing to appear on both sides in
any given instance, but ZEI is not meant to be read as such a
connective. Say "denpa bu zei sarji" is a lujvo for "x1 is a dot-side
supporter", and for whatever reason you wanted to make a lerfu out of
that lujvo, the lerfu would naurally come out as "[(denpa
bu)-zei-sarji] bu", no?

> I hope that I am able to deliver a working grammar from which I will
> graciously receive from you any improvements that you would care to
> offer.

OK, but my proposed improvements, in the case of ZEI, will be to go
back to what we have now, and in the case of SA, to go to something
like "erase back to the beginning of the sentence". So they won't be
just minor patches to what you are doing...

But I shouldn't be discouraging you from what you are doing. I think
we really do need to finish the grammar, I'm just a bit uneasy with
the direction you want to take it...

mu'o mi'e xorxes

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