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Re: [lojban] &Lang

.arpis., On 14/08/2012 17:30:

> Either I've misunderstood your response, or you've misunderstood the
> challenge. The challenge is that the same bound variable need never
> be repeated. Sure for any given single sentence containing n
> different variables you can define an equivalent single predicate
> with n arguments, but you can't do this for each of the infinitely
> many sentences in a language.

But you _can_!


Ah, so I did misunderstand your response.


That's how you'd build up sentences if the language's mechanism for
composing concepts involves uniting them into larger predicates.


I wish I'd been able to understand your worked example, then, because that's the direction where I think the solution lies: iteratively uniting two predicates into one, with a method for indicating which argument-places merge into a single argument-place, ideally without having lexicosyntactically *explicit* variables filling argument-places.

E.g. F(a,b) and G(c,d) merge into a compound predicate H(a,b=c,d).

(My own unpublished solutiontakes this approach, with an inflectional machinery for encoding how two argument lists (e.g. <a, b> & <c, d>) merge into one  (e.g. <a, b=c, d>).)

Combinatory logic provides a notation based on S and K (or another
one based on B, C, K, and W) for expressing predicates without
explicit reference.

Concatenative programming uses the idea of a stack to avoid explicit
reference.

The J Programming Language uses ideas from the above to be very terse
and linear without explicit variables.


Thanks for that, and I appreciate that you may well lack time or inclination to explain further, but if I'm to understand these promising-looking ideas, I'd need a lot more handholding.

--And.

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