[lojban] {moi}3, Predicates, and Conventions

[tsani nicte <nictytan@gmail.com>]

A discussion latro'a and I had in IRC the other day led me to want a brivla version of {mei} and by extension, every MOI. I already devised their lojban definitions:
.i ka ce'u me ce'u MOI ...
where "..." represents any trailing places of the MOI.

My proposal is making zi'evla for each. (A lujvo for this purpose is impossible by my standards.) I just need suggestions for what to use as a zi'evla head.

As for moi3, I'm a bit puzzled as to how we can construct a predicate to order/associate the keys with the values. In truly associative cases, as in {lo me mi moi} we can use a simple binary predicate: {lo ka ce'u broda ce'u}. 
e.g. {.i (ko'a goi lo'i toldi fo'a goi lo ka ce'u se melbi ce'u zo'u) lo me mi moi be ko'a bei fo'a cu barda zmadu lo me do moi be ko'a bei fo'a}
(I have put the prenex in parentheses to enhance readability. Also, I have decided semi-arbitrarily that the order of arguments for the association predicate, i.e. moi3, be F(key,value), but I suspect that F(value,key) be more useful. (It might require less SE conversions. Otherwise the classic trick of the lambda prenex with ce'ai is acceptable.) Anyway, I'm not sure of the ideal order.)

(It occurs to me that some might not know what this type of associative construct is actually useful for. Here's an example: {.i .abu cusku lu lo mi zdani cu barda li'u .ije .abu skuspu fi lu .i ua .i si'anai lo me mi moi cu cmalu}. Implicitly, the set in this case is {lo'i dinju} that by xorlo magic contains only the relevant elements and the association predicate is {lo ka ce'u se zdani ce'u}.)

As for numeric moi, things get trickier, because the predicate needs to order the elements (which means they must be somehow orderable.) For the purpose of exemplification, let's take {lo'i prenu} as our moi2, and try to create a predicate that numerically orders them according to the time at which they arrive at my house. (This is the part I'm not sure of:) {lo ka ce'u zmadu ce'u lo ni ca makau ce'u klamu'o lo mi zdani}. It looks like each argument of the predicate refers to elements of the set. {moi} is "smart" enough to order the elements of the set based on which elements are superior to which elements. This is reminiscent of simxu2, isn't it?

My problem with this is that behaviour of moi and moi3 seems to depend on whether the moi is numeric or associative, unless I or someone else can construct a decent type of moi3 that is universal for numeric and associative moi. I've thought about maybe using va'e in moi3-numeric to directly associate the numeric indices with the values, but I'm not sure how I'll go about getting a reference to the appropriate value inside moi3.

Thoughts, comments, hate mail, (spam?) and flame wars are appreciated as usual.

.i mi'e la tsani mu'o

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