Subject: Re: [lojban] Re: ca'a pu (was: Why is there so much irregularity in cmavo/gismu?)

From: Richard Curnow <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 16 Nov 2001 22:55:14 +0000

On Wed, Nov 14, 2001 at 07:33:06AM -0700, Jay Kominek wrote:
> 
> On Wed, 14 Nov 2001, John Cowan wrote:
> 
> > Jay Kominek wrote:
> >
> > > {mi ca'a pu broda} does not work.
> >
> > If so, that is a bug: ku is not required after a free-standing
> > modal (unlike after "na"), so ca'a pu is just ca'a[ku] pu.
> 
> Being a bit more awake this morning, I thought to check the official
> parser. {mi ca'a pu broda} does indeed work with it, and it does insert
> that [ku].
> 
> So, it is a jbofi'e bug then, I suppose. (Just tested jbofi'e 0.38, it
> doesn't work, either)
> 

Obviously {mi pu ca'a broda} does work. So the key difference is that
'pu' cannot follow 'ca'a' within a single time construction.

I've investigated why jbofi'e doesn't reduce ca'a to a standalone term
(inferring 'ku') when 'pu' is the lookahead token. Essentially, it's
because it thinks it's starting to see something like

mi ca'a pu gi le nanmu gi le ninmu cu broda

(whatever that might mean), i.e. it's expecting to see 'gi' after pu to
make everything work out OK. This expression parses OK on the official
v2.33 parser. (I don't actually have the official v3 parser running yet
- I've never got round to sorting the build out.)

I need to away and think quite hard about this problem. The full extent
of the bug is not yet clear to me - I presume I'm missing one of the
pre-parser stages that the official parser has.

It's certainly pointing to a need to press on with building the official
v3 parser & the random sentence generator I half finished, so I can
start smoking out other corner-cases like this one.

-- 
Richard.
---------------------------------+-------------------------------------
Richard P. Curnow | C++: n., An octopus made by
Weston-super-Mare, UK | nailing extra legs on a cat.
http://www.rrbcurnow.freeuk.com/ |