🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <hansg.728031611@risken> hansg@risken.vd.volvo.se (Hans Granqvist) writes:
>This may be a strange question, but having read in the latest issue of
>BYTE about Machine Translation, I thought, why not express the source
>language in yacc to resolve all ambiguities like "the can can be filled"
>where "can" is noun or verb?

There are two immediate problems with such a scheme, which have noting
to do with lexical ambiguity:

(1) There are phenomena in natural language (including Swedish, I
believe) which are provably not context free.  Since the syntax used
in YACC is less than context-free (LALR(1), I believe), one of the
difficulties would be to change the syntax people used with the
translator.

(2) In a computer language grammar given to a compiler compiler like
YACC, the syntax and the semantics of each token is defined before
hand to be simple and unambiguous.  Although our knowledge of natural
language semantics is incomplete, we *do* know that it's doesn't have
those properties.

Good Luck.
--
John O'Neil
"Occasionally I believed I had thoughts of my own --  who does not now
 and then become the victim of such delusions?"
						-- Paul Feyerabend