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Hussell | 8 years ago

Eliminating syntactic (not semantic) ambiguity is indeed a noble goal, but I was kind of horrified when I first realized how it's done in Lojban. Practically every type of phrase has both its start and its end marked by a unique word or class of words, with the terminator usually optional in any context where dropping it would not result in any ambiguity. Knowing exactly when dropping a terminator would result in ambiguity is pretty difficult, and in practice is rare enough that seeing a terminator is something of a surprise and usually requires a trip to look it up in the dictionary.

It seems to me that a grammar based on strictly right (or left) branching (that's prefix or postfix notation, or Polish or reverse Polish notation, for the programmers and mathematicians out there) would eliminate the need for all these optional terminators (which are effectively optional parentheses to clarify the order of operations).

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