WikiDiscuss

>> The grammar in its current state does four separable things:
>
> Just because they *can* be seperated, doesn't mean they should be.

No, of course not.

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

And just because they have heretofore been unified, doesn't mean that they
should be, either.

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

Simple: for parsing purposes, a brivla is a brivla is a brivla. It's only
when you get around to trying to figure out the meaning of a sentence that
it begins to matter how it was formed, from which one can determine what it
means.

>> 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.

Well, of course if one (very influential) partipant is "vehemently opposed"
to any separation, then any proposal for separation would necessarily either
be rejected immediately, or result in hours of argument.

>> 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.

It might also result in a noticeable speedup. Just for example, with the
current grammar for determining selma'o, validation would be done twice:
once when &cmavo is evaluated, and again when each of the letters is
scanned, because of all the lookahead involved in all the single-letter
rules.

>> 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.

Like I say, I believe that partitioning, validation and characterization are
probably simpler considered separately than together. It takes a genius of
Jorge's caliber to write or understand a parser that does all three
simultaneously. I strongly suspect that if separate grammars were used to
solve pieces of the whole problem, each would be simple enough that many,
many more people would be able to understand them. Ideally, they would be
simple enough that it would be feasible to see whether the grammar(s) do
what the prose description says.

Clark