Re: [lojban] Does the lojban language include the empty string?

[Jorge Llambías <jjllambias@gmail.com>]

On Thu, Jun 19, 2014 at 10:19 PM, Riley Martinez-Lynch <shunpiker@gmail.com> wrote:

In the course of working on a script to extract grammatical lojban texts from a stream of heterogenous input, I discovered that camxes considers an empty string to be a valid lojban text. I tried jbofihe and yacc/grammar.300, and got the same result.

Is the empty string (ε) really intended to be included in the lojban language, or is this a quirk of the machine grammar implementations?

xu lo'u le'u te gerna lo jbobau

It was done on purpose. It would be trivial to change the grammar to disallow it. If we disallow it, however, would we also have to consider the text "valsi si" ungrammatical?  

 

If it is included, as the parsers indicate, null lojban texts are to be found everywhere that you can't parse the beginning of a non-null lojban text.

Thoughts?

I'm not sure I follow. The grammar can only parse one text at a time, it can't parse a string of texts, so I'm not sure I see what the problem is. A non-null text is just one text, not a sequence of null texts followed by a non-null text, just like "broda brode" is one single text, not text "broda" followed by second text "brode".

mu'o mi'e xorxes

 

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