WikiDiscuss

On Tue, Dec 21, 2004 at 04:27:01PM -0800, wikidiscuss@lojban.org
wrote:
> Jorge, this is just marvelous work — I'm in awe. (I'm also
> envious of the amount of free time you appear to have.
> However, I have a concern about the overall approach you're taking
> — the high-level design, as it were.

Actually, the high-level design is mine, not his. See:

http://www.digitalkingdom.org/~rlpowell/hobbies/lojban/grammar/

> The grammar in its current state does four separable things:

Just because they *can* be seperated, doesn't mean they should be.

> 1. It partitions the input stream into words.
>
> 2. It validates the words, rejecting invalid vowel and consonant patterns.
>
> 3. It determines the selma'o of a cmavo.
>
> 4. It categorizes brivla into gismu, lujvo and fu'ivla.

In fact, these are not seperate actions, so far as I know, in either
jbofihe or the current official parser.

I don't consider step 2 to be distinct from step 4, by the way.

> As a result, the grammar is fearsomely complex in spots. (OK, the
> part that recognizes selma'o isn't complex; it's just huge.)

Yup. You should see the version in the main grammar.

> And it could be argued that categorizing brivla really belongs to
> semantic analysis, not parsing.

Umm, what?

> For the sake of modularity and reducing point-complexity, I think
> it would be worth considering splitting the job into its
> components, and writing separate grammars:

The problem with this is that we could argue for hours over where
the seperations lie. I was vehemently opposed to seperating out the
morphology from the rest of the grammar in the first place, in fact.

> Of course this scheme depends on being able to combine multiple
> PEG-generated parsers into a single program.

Already done. What you're describing might result in a noticeable
slowdown in processing, but I can't be sure.

> But if the parser generator takes parameters which can be used to
> name the input and parser functions, that shouldn't be hard.

It's a pain in the ass, but it's not hard.

> Or is there already a consensus that the requirement is for a
> single grand grammar covering every relevant aspect of the
> language?

As I said, the grammar is already in two parts: morphology and
syntax. The only reason I agreed to that, however, is that it was
pointed out that other, completely different, morphologies might
want to be used, and that that should be allowed for.

-Robin