Re: Throwing out the tree-structured grammar (SF Xenolinguistics FAQ)?
| From: | Tim May <butsuri@...> |
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| Date: | Saturday, June 11, 2005, 21:38 |
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Ray Brown wrote at 2005-06-11 20:17:14 (+0100)
> On Friday, June 10, 2005, at 07:26 , Patrick Littell wrote:
> >
> > To be needlessly picky about it, a stack language -- that is, one whose
> > underlying computational implementation is a stack -- is still a
> > tree-structured language. More precisely, it's the reverse Polish
> > notation (postfix traversal) of a tree. If it weren't, the stack would
> > either underrun or (eventually) overflow.
>
> I don't think you're being needlessly picky. What you say is quite
> correct. IMHO the author of the FAQ that Steven quoted is being
> rather vague, and "I feel no urge to attempt to describe such
> horrors" seems a bit of a let-out to me. Has the author thought
> through what s/he's writing? Without an attempt to describe 'such
> horrors' I take the FAQ with a big pinch of salt.
Have you read it? (To begin with, it's not an FAQ - I don't know why
Steven called it that.)
> My impression is that the author of the FAQ has not really thought
> through what s/he has written. IMO without the attempt to describe
> 'such horrors' it does not really say anything more than "Alien
> grammars may be quite different from any grammars of our familiar
> earth languages."
>
> So what? Until we encounter any such aliens, we will not know.
>
What do you mean "so what"? That's a perfectly reasonable point to
make in that context.
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