Subject: [lojban] Re: modularity & grammar (was: RE: Re: nai in UI (was: BPFK phpbb)

From: Robert McIvor <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 6 May 2003 17:50:29 -0400

On Tuesday, May 6, 2003, at 08:24 US/Eastern, Robert LeChevalier wrote:

> In fact this is what happened in Lojban, but the complaint is invalid 
> because the bulk of the language was designed by JCB, who was not much 
> more computer literate than others of his generation, and was done by 
> hand without a computer.

I rather think he was considerably more computer literate than most 
others of his generation, though it wasn't applied to Loglan until, I 
believe Sheldon Linker made the first suggestion to use YACC to prove 
the unambiguous nature of the grammar. I believe he used computer 
programmes extensively in testing Careers and its successors.

>
> The formalization of the grammar as a set of rules WAS done by 
> programmers, but JCB started with a corpus of 
> grammatical-by-definition sentences with parse structures that he 
> defined, and told the programmers to devise rules that would create 
> the desired parse. Only minor changes were made in the corpus over 
> the years other than to expand it. But from 1976 to 1983 or so, TLI 
> Loglan was defined by the corpus rather than by the YACC rules for 
> that corpus.

This is true, and still is in 2003. Any modification to the parser 
must still parse the corpus,, which, as you say, has had only trivial 
changes to the original, and new additions to cover additional 
structures added to the language.

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From: Robert McIvor <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 6 May 2003 17:50:29 -0400