Lojban In General

Posted by lojbab on Tue 24 of Jun, 2008 01:56 GMT posts: 162

All the recent work on a glosser and the PEG Grammar inspired me to
corner Nora during her last vacation, and we finally finished updating
the Random Sentence Generator to the baseline grammar, something I
started only 10 years ago %^).

This involved converting the program from the old DOS-based Basic
compiler, which wouldn't compile it any more, probably due to the abuse
we inflicted with string handling, to Visual Basic which can handle it.

The program has been tested more or less using Visual Basic Express
2005, which we downloaded from Microsoft. However our understanding is
that we cannot create a standalone executable from VB Express - anyone
who wants to use the RSG would have to download VB Express onto their
machine in order to have the necessary run time library, and this isn't
satisfactory.

The best solution would be to have someone who has Visual Studio, or one
of the comparable Visual Basic packages prepare a standalone executable,
and perhaps even a website executable (I am not sure what is involved in
that). We could zip up the project directory and the data files, and
email them to a willing person who has more of a clue than we do (Nora
might eventually learn how to do it at work, but rarely has any time to
work on such things, and so far as we know the program is usable now).

People who detest Microsoft are of course free to port the program to
another version of Basic, or even another language, after it is released
(we'll ask Robin make the source available on the Lojban website, but be
forewarned that this is incredibly ancient code, much of which were
written on a TRS-80 and is loaded with minimally commented 2 letter
variables), but we want to make sure this version works first on some
machine other than ours.

For those unfamiliar with the RSG, it has 6 levels of complexity, which
were based on the outline for the original Lojban textbook that I
started back in 1989, but completed only 6 and a fraction chapters of
(this was rewritten by John Cowan into a 20+ lesson collection which I
think is the version now found on the Lojban website, preceded by an
introductory lesson that I wrote anew. Alas, the rewrite no longer
corresponds to the original outline, but it still serves as a basis for
generating relatively easy (if nonsensical) sentences at the lowest
levels of complexity.

The first 4 levels correspond to what I had intended to cover by certain
chapters of the textbook. The 5th level of complexity uses the full
baseline grammar, and a somewhat reasonably weighted set of cmavo (so
that "pa" is a more frequent numeral than "ci'i"). These can be used by
learners of various levels of competence.

There are options to show the text parenthesized according to the source
grammar, and which perform the simplest removals of elidable terminators
(someone might be able to improve that, but I'm not sure it is worth it)

The 6th level of complexity is intentionally unnatural to emphasize some
of the less common constructions, and all cmavo of a selma'o are equally
likely. If someone wants to test a parser (or the PEG grammar) that is
the ultimate stress test - every sentence is grammatical in theory, but
the RSG is quite capable of producing a 20 line humdinger with nested
termsets inside of relative clauses inside of a MEX construction, that I
cannot imagine could be translated. I'm not sure it has much other use
than as a stress test of a human or computer parser.

The last release of the RSG reflected the grammar of 1991, which evolved
considerably before the baseline (the cmavo also changed as well).
http://www.lojban.org/files/software/rndsen28.zip

and you can see some discussion of the outputs on
http://www.lojban.org/tiki/tiki-index.php?page=random+sentence+generator&bl
though I'm not sure which program was used to create the various examples.

lojbab

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Posted by pdf23ds on Tue 24 of Jun, 2008 02:22 GMT posts: 143

On Mon, Jun 23, 2008 at 8:52 PM, Robert LeChevalier <lojbab@lojban.org> wrote:
> The program has been tested more or less using Visual Basic Express 2005,
> which we downloaded from Microsoft. However our understanding is that we
> cannot create a standalone executable from VB Express - anyone who wants to
> use the RSG would have to download VB Express onto their machine in order to
> have the necessary run time library, and this isn't satisfactory.
>
> The best solution would be to have someone who has Visual Studio, or one of
> the comparable Visual Basic packages prepare a standalone executable, and
> perhaps even a website executable (I am not sure what is involved in that).
> We could zip up the project directory and the data files, and email them to
> a willing person who has more of a clue than we do (Nora might eventually
> learn how to do it at work, but rarely has any time to work on such things,
> and so far as we know the program is usable now).

My job is working with Visual Studio, and while I work with C#, I'm
sure I could do VB too, so I'd be glad to help you compile the
program.

Chris Capel
--
"What is it like to be a bat? What is it like to bat a bee? What is it
like to be a bee being batted? What is it like to be a batted bee?"
-- The Mind's I (Hofstadter, Dennet)

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with the subject unsubscribe, or go to http://www.lojban.org/lsg2/, or if
you're really stuck, send mail to secretary@lojban.org for help.

Posted by lojbab on Fri 04 of Jul, 2008 08:42 GMT posts: 162

Chris Capel wrote:
> On Mon, Jun 23, 2008 at 8:52 PM, Robert LeChevalier <lojbab@lojban.org> wrote:
>
>>The program has been tested more or less using Visual Basic Express 2005,
>>which we downloaded from Microsoft. However our understanding is that we
>>cannot create a standalone executable from VB Express - anyone who wants to
>>use the RSG would have to download VB Express onto their machine in order to
>>have the necessary run time library, and this isn't satisfactory.
>>
>>The best solution would be to have someone who has Visual Studio, or one of
>>the comparable Visual Basic packages prepare a standalone executable, and
>>perhaps even a website executable (I am not sure what is involved in that).
>> We could zip up the project directory and the data files, and email them to
>>a willing person who has more of a clue than we do (Nora might eventually
>>learn how to do it at work, but rarely has any time to work on such things,
>>and so far as we know the program is usable now).
>
> My job is working with Visual Studio, and while I work with C#, I'm
> sure I could do VB too, so I'd be glad to help you compile the
> program.

With any luck, this should be a hierarchy of directories containing the
entire project and all need data files in the resources subdirectory.

Sorry for the delay - my wife had a work deadline, and it was difficult
to corner her to try to figure out what needed to be sent, and where it
was hidden in the file system.

Let me know what happens.

lojbab

Posted by lojbab on Fri 04 of Jul, 2008 10:11 GMT posts: 162

Bob LeChevalier wrote:
> With any luck, this should be a hierarchy of directories containing the
> entire project and all need data files in the resources subdirectory.
>
> Sorry for the delay - my wife had a work deadline, and it was difficult
> to corner her to try to figure out what needed to be sent, and where it
> was hidden in the file system.
>
> Let me know what happens.

My apologies for posting to the group with an attached binary. That was
intended to be for Chris Capel only, but I'm apparently half asleep.

lojbab

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with the subject unsubscribe, or go to http://www.lojban.org/lsg2/, or if
you're really stuck, send mail to secretary@lojban.org for help.